Madhur Bhandarkar and the New Bollywood Social

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c h a p t e r 14 Madhur Bhandarkar and the New Bollywood Social

Ulka Anjaria

adhur Bhandarkar is often referenced as distinct from main- Mstream directors for his disruption of Bollywood generic conventions, evinced in his ‘dark and real’ stories (I. Chatterjee 2014) on ‘serious issues’ (Sharma 2014: 52), the lack of conventional song-and-dance sequences in his films (Garwood 2006: 177–180), his representation of queer sexuality (Singh 2014: 95, 105) and his heroine-centred stories (Moin 2014: 652). But despite these qualities and the interest in Hindi film studies in the margins of the mainstream industry and in feminism and sexuality in Bollywood, there is surprisingly little scholarship that investigates the aesthetics and generic qualities of Bhandarkar’s films. He seems to fall into a gap that has arisen in the field in the recent years between the realist impulse evident in film-makers like Vishal Bhardwaj, Abhishek Chaubey, Anurag Kashyap and others, who tend to move away from Bollywood conventions, and the lavish over- the-top formula films that define a classically Bollywood aesthetic such as those of Yash Chopra and Karan Johar. Yet this in-betweenness might be seen as a particular mode of aesthetic, formal and political experiment in what many identify Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

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as a changing Bollywood cinema. Indeed, Bhandarkar has often been criticized for failing to achieve flawless films (I. Chatterjee 2014) despite winning the National Film Award three times. His films have never done very well at the box office, with the exception of Chandni Bar (2001) and Page 3 (2005)—and even those were only semi-hits.1 His particular predicament seems to be that his films are neither gritty and realist enough nor melodramatic and spectacular enough. Indeed, he seems to be profoundly aware of the vacillations of representation that are necessary for a commer- cial, melodramatic and non-realist mode such as popular cinema to represent social concerns. Upon closer look, his films portray an acute awareness of the possibilities and limitations of popular cinema through extended experiments with realism and political film-making.

A Socially Conscious Film-maker

Nine out of Bhandarkar’s 11 films (as of early 2015) have a straight- forward social message. Of these, four (Chandni Bar, Satta, Fashion and Heroine) explicitly raise issues of gender and sexuality by centring on a female protagonist even as those themes also lie at the background of films such as Page 3 and Corporate. The nine social films can also be divided roughly in half based on the milieux they primarily represent: four (Page 3 [2005], Corporate [2006], Fashion [2008] and Heroine [2012]) focus on the lives of the rich and glamorous, three (Chandni Bar [2001], Traffic Signal [2007] and Jail [2009]) on the downtrodden and socially marginalized and two (Aan: Men at Work [2004; henceforth, Aan] and Satta [2003]) are somewhere in the middle centring on the corruption of the political elite and the underworld who are certainly rich though not particularly glamorous. Yet characters from other milieux are interspersed throughout both sets of films. Thus, Traffic Signal offers glimpses into the sordid lives of Mumbai’s socialites through their car windows as they await the light change at the Kelkar Road traffic signal, and conversely, Page 3 and Corporate offer snatches of otherwise absent subaltern perspectives through Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

the witty ruminations of drivers, office peons and security guards; as these figures—never named or otherwise individuated—stand waiting on their employers at their various professional and social engagements, they exchange light banter that exposes the superficiality and hollowness of the lives of the wealthy (a formula which seems to have anticipated the wily chauffeur Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger [2008]). Thus, if we consider Bhandarkar’s oeuvre as a whole we see a commitment to representing not only individual social ills but the larger social landscape of contemporary Mumbai, spread as it is across multiple gaps of wealth and social standing. This interest allows him to identify, along with the stark inequali- ties that characterize the city, common concerns that cross social divides such as the suffering of women, the violence of capitalism, the straining of the social contract, hypocrisy and jealousy as features of human nature and even questions of body image— which, he shows, affect the poor as well as the rich (in Traffic Signal, a young dark-skinned boy spends his paltry earnings on fairness cream with dreams of changing his complexion). The female-centred films stand out for their investment in representing modern gender crises in urban India and for breaking the pattern in Bollywood of representing women as side characters—as pretty accessories at worst and secondary protagonists at best—in male-oriented plots. Satta is striking not only for its female lead but for the way Anuradha (Raveena Tandon) is characterized as a protagonist who abides by none of the popular cinematic logic that keeps female characters silent sufferers in the face of oppression. At numerous times throughout the film, Anuradha boldly raises her eyes to those who try to silence her—her husband, her in-laws, campaign workers, politicians, even her lover—and directly refutes their insults in extended speeches that bespeak not only her moral high ground but her keen understanding of their hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is, in this film as in so many others of Bhandarkar’s, a key theme, which often manifests itself in gender inequality, and Anuradha seems to have an endless fount of speeches she uses to shame her attackers into acknowledging their own. Mumtaz (Tabu), the Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

protagonist of Chandni Bar, is much less articulate—she probably speaks a dozen lines of dialogue in the whole film—but her life and those of the other dancers at the beer bar where she works also buckle under the hypocrisies of patriarchy. Even more so than Anuradha, Mumtaz is subject to insult by almost everyone she meets; she is always referred to as ‘tu’ (rather than the more formal ‘tum’ or ‘aap’) and everywhere she goes men treat her with contempt. In the few cases when she dares to speak out she is accused of offending men’s honour. Unlike Satta, Chandni Bar ends on a bleak note; although Mumtaz has come far in making a life for herself and her children after the death of her husband Pottya (Atul Kulkarni), her son becomes involved in street gangs and her daughter becomes a bar dancer, suggesting that the myth of self-making is brutally hollow. Corporate, Fashion and Heroine pursue the questions of gender and sexuality in different ways; the three films represent the cost of fame and money on the lives of women. The protagonists of Fashion and Heroine are ridden with anxiety which veers precari- ously into mental illness—an anxiety that largely reflects the shal- lowness of the new glamour industries. But even where he is so critical of these industries, Bhandarkar is sensitive to the way in which a critique of contemporary India’s new forms of desire and aspiration could quickly revert to traditionalist patriarchy, where women’s desires are circumscribed because of the immorality they might spawn. Thus, in Corporate, we are asked to respect Nishi’s (Bipasha Basu) ruthless ambition even as we see the intense corruption and moral turpitude of the corporate world in which she works. In Fashion as well, although Meghna (Priyanka Chopra) is driven to alcoholism and other self-destructive behaviour by the selfishness and greed of the fashion industry, her decision to leave Mumbai and give up modelling altogether is not presented as a solution. Rather, Fashion suggests that the choice between domesticity and capitalism is a false one and ends up hurting women; the ideal is to integrate both so that women can live a rich and sat- isfying life while still holding on to dreams of making it big. Here this conflict is resolved when Meghna’s parents finally accept her desire to be a model (they had earlier disowned her), suggesting Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

that the social problem is not in the fashion industry itself but in a patriarchal culture that has little room for women’s aspirations. In Heroine, it turns out the film industry is so destructive for Mahi (Kareena Kapoor) that she does have to leave it altogether in order to reclaim herself; here Bollywood is presented as ironically antithetical to female desire. This film is much more fragmented and disjointed than Corporate or Fashion and we know much less about Mahi than we did about Nishi or Meghna. Some have suggested—and box office returns seem to confirm this—that this is because Heroine is a failed film (R. Chatterjee 2012), but there is something suggestive about reading it not as a repetition of the same topic of the perils women face in capitalist India but as a sort of return or revisiting of this theme through the vexed trope of cinephilia (discussed further below). Whereas Fashion touches on some questions of stardom, Heroine more explicitly asks its audience to consider what it means to act at all: both the kind of acting that is required of film stars at work and the kinds of per- formances that are necessary to manage desire in the new India more broadly. This is captured in the novel’s plot when in order to recover her failing career Mahi leaks a sex video of herself; the sex tape, once understood as a violent invasion on private desire, here is recast as a performance of that invasion and the question of the ‘privacy’ of desire is no longer the operative one. New India—the movie suggests—epitomized by the film industry, requires that participants constantly ‘act’ and ‘perform’ various versions of themselves and suggests that this requirement might leave no room for a real self to emerge. Mahi’s bipolar diagnosis is thus mentioned but not made a central element of the film (unlike in Woh Lamhe [2006], for instance), serving more as a metaphor for all of the different selves that she must increasingly be than as a literal diagnosis. Sexuality is also an important theme in Bhandarkar’s films, most evident in his representation of queer characters. Some scholars have criticized his stereotypical depiction of queer characters (R. Chatterjee 2012) and certainly there are several gay male characters in particular who seem to be represented only for comic relief—especially in Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji (2011). However, these Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

should not overshadow the variety of representations of queerness in Bhandarkar’s oeuvre as a whole. The gay prostitute in Traffic Signal, for instance, is depicted with sympathy as he devel- ops a camaraderie with Noorie (Konkona Sen Sharma), a female prostitute working at the same bus stand—one that is belied by their initial competition over clients. Similarly, the one-night liai- son between the protagonist Mahi and Promita in Heroine goes a significant way in destigmatizing lesbian love, even though it does little to redeem that love or rope it in to Bollywood domesticity. Fashion too, although peppered with gay stereotypes in its minor characters, represents Rahul Arora (Samir Soni) as a gay fashion designer struggling with parental and social pressures to start a family. He ends up suggesting a marriage of convenience with his best friend, the female fashion model Janet Sequeira (Mugdha Godse), to which she agrees not only because of their friendship but as an acknowledgement of her own precarious relationship, as a fashion model, with middle-class domesticity. By connecting these two characters in this queer plot the film makes the radical move of presenting modelling as a sort of queer subjectivity as well. Indeed throughout his films, Bhandarkar extends queerness beyond gay or lesbian characters: in the intense female friendships in Chandni Bar; in Anuradha’s taking of a lover while still legally married in Satta and then her decision, at the very end of the film, to live alone; and in Dominic (Ranvir Shorey)’s unrequited love of Noorie in Traffic Signal. All these suggest forms of intimacy out- side of the heteronormative family and the traditional structure of Bollywood domesticity. Bhandarkar’s films also seem to evince interest in questions of masculinity, although this theme lies much deeper under the sur- face of his films. It does help to explain, however, what seem to be his two outlier films: Aan, whose ‘social’ message strangely sup- ports police encounter killings and Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, which does not seem to have a social message at all. Aan is curiously subtitled ‘Men at Work’, suggesting some investment in questions of masculinity—but in the film masculinity is for the most part inseparable from ‘aan [honour]’, which suggests, through what Anustup Basu (2010) calls ‘the encounter genre’ (177), that Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

heroism resides in doing what one thinks is right even if it is illegal. (The theme of encounter killings, with similar treatment, briefly appears in Page 3 as well [Sarma 2014: 88].) The ‘men’ of the subtitle thus deserve that appellation primarily because they display an unrestrained amount of masculine valour in the form of long, extended physical fights with seasoned criminals and because they participate in the murder—some at point blank range—of around two dozen underworld criminals: they are honourable because they take the law into their own hands. Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, although a very different kind of film, was, like Aan, a flop; and although it might easily be dismissed for its weak plot and infantile humour, can alternatively be seen as an attempt to subject modern masculinity to the same scrutiny to which Fashion and Heroine subject modern femininity. The three- hero structure replicates a pattern initiated by Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and that has since been taken up by a myriad of films—a structure that suggests that there is no longer a viable unitary figure that might epitomize masculine heroism, but that films have to represent different models for masculinity side by side (in this case: the nice guy, the playboy and the dork) in order to capture the diversity of men’s experiences in the twenty-first century. It also suggests that the nature of manhood must be rethought in a middle-class and post-patriarchal context (in this film at least, there are no authoritarian parents or other modes of societal repression) when sex, for the most part, is readily avail- able to both men and women. What makes these films outliers is how disconnected these potentially interesting commentaries on masculinity are from Bhandarkar’s other social critiques: thus, in Aan we have a film that exonerates the kind of extra-legal police actions strongly condemned in Chandni Bar, in which Pottya is unjustly killed in a police encounter; and in Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji middle-class entitlement runs freely (as when Naren [Ajay Devgan] bribes a police officer to release a rich drunk driver from jail), where elsewhere in Bhandarkar’s oeuvre that same entitlement is subject to intense satire and social critique. Historians of Hindi cinema might be reluctant to call these films ‘social’ in the way the term has been used in the past, Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

although they do seem to conform to Ravi Vasudevan’s (1995) definition of the social as ‘the genre used to address the prob- lems of modern life’ (307). But politically speaking, Bhandarkar’s films neither resemble the working man’s films of the 1970s nor do they—with the exception of Corporate—excoriate the evils of capitalism. In fact, many of them might even be seen to celebrate capitalism.2 And when they do represent socially marginalized protagonists they do so without the possibility for insurgency or revolt: Chandni Bar renders Mumtaz as a perpetual victim; Traffic Signal and Page 3 end by suggesting that the characters’ exploita- tive lives will continue forever; and where there is justice, as in the ending of Jail, it is solitary rather than collective. Yet at the same time, Bhandarkar’s films are clearly more political than the fanciful romances of the 1990s or the ‘neoliberal’ plots of India’s new middle-class films. It is precisely this transgression of these deep-seated categories that marks his work as distinct from some of his contemporaries.

Realism and Naturalism

Critics often claim that Bollywood films do not abide by the conventions of cinematic realism (Chakravarty 1993: 80–81), even as there is some sense among critics that post-2000 Hindi popular cinema has undergone a realist turn (Gopal 2011: 54; Naresh and Prakash 2015: 1; Srivastava 2009: 706–707). Contemporary Bollywood realism is often characterized by more believable plots, fewer song and dream sequences, more relatable, nuanced characters, and increasingly, stories located in realistic settings such as contemporary Indian cities rather than on fantastic sets in rural landed estates. But the problem with this definition is that it conflates realism with the ‘realistic’ and thus overlooks long- standing debates among realist writers and film-makers about how best realism might serve the cause of political representation. For instance, Leftist writers and film-makers have tradition- ally coupled their representations of the harsh lives of the poor with a representation of a better future, even if that future has not Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

yet been realized. Thus, realism attains a utopic dimension that is often not, in fact, realistic. Bhandarkar’s realism, by contrast, veers towards what has been identified in literary studies as ‘naturalism’, which is the representation of the poor not as an immanent proletariat but as suffering under oppressive conditions to the point of reduc- ing their humanity to the realm of what Giorgio Agamben (1998) calls, in the context of the Nazi concentration camps, bare life. In naturalism, plot and character succumb to external environmen- tal or circumstantial forces. We see elements of this in the plotless- ness of several of Bhandarkar’s films. For instance, Traffic Signal has an entirely episodic plot with almost no narrative move- ment. The film centres around a community of characters who cluster around a busy traffic signal in Mumbai; the overt political impulse is in bringing their lives to the screen, as conveyed in the film’s dedication:

This film is dedicated to the multitudes of people working at the traffic signals in the country…. We do not intend to demean, mock, ridicule or make value judgments on the professions or lifestyles of these people…. As a matter of fact we are genuinely moved and overawed by the grit and determination shown by these people in their day to day struggle for survival at the traffic signals.

‘Grit’, ‘determination’, ‘day-to-day struggle’ and ‘survival’ accurately convey the politics of this film, which is that of persistence in the fate of hardship. The mode of the film bends to that politics so that it too is structured around repeated patterns: showing the characters plying their wares to the cars every day as they stop at the traffic signal, showing the repeated patterns—a male car passenger who calls women vendors close to stroke their hands in sexual pleasure, a beggar who acts mentally ill, and so on—that constitute the unvarying days for those who make their living at the traffic signal. Even when the signal is demolished due to development the local gangster Silsila (Kunal Khemu) simply finds another intersection where he will set up his enterprise again. The trope of this film, therefore, is the repeated and continual nature both of the lives of those who make their living at the traffic signal Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

and, more broadly, of development in the city at large (i.e., you can demolish one slum but another will quickly appear). An episodic structure is found in Jail as well, which is also a film that seeks to humanize the characters it represents. Jail offers a much more realistic representation of prison life than anything seen in Bollywood before; but the film’s realism goes beyond that. Jail has almost no plot to speak of—or, more accurately, the story lies precisely in the lack of plot: Parag (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is wrongly jailed and despite repeated appearances before the court his appli- cation for release on bail is continually refused. Thus, he embarks upon a seemingly endless cycle of jail life (waking, eating, talk- ing, working and sleeping)—itself monotonous and repetitive— punctured by sporadic appearances in court where his bail plea is denied and after which he has no choice but to return, a little more dejected each time, to jail. This cycle constitutes the film’s ‘plot’ in its characterization of the difficult and debased lives of India’s prisoners. Like Traffic Signal, Jail ends on a plea for respecting the human rights of India’s 3.7 lakh prisoners, the majority of whom, the titles announce, ‘have not been found guilty’. Bhandarkar incorporates this naturalist impulse into other films in more minor but still significant ways—evinced in Page 3’s repetitive, cyclical and episodic representation of one socialite soirée after another, many of which have no bearing on the film’s plot, and in Chandni Bar’s representation of the repetitive life of the bar dancer, which one character describes as: ‘Wahi sala beer bar, wahi dhuan, wahi customers…, wahi jhuti hansi. Roz ka wahi chakkar hai [The same damned beer bar, the same smoke, the same customers…, the same fake smiles. Every day is the same cycle]’. In all these examples the sheer monotony of life becomes a significant element of the films’ political critiques. In Chandni Bar Mumtaz’s life acquires a harried inevitability, so that, as mentioned above, despite her attempts to improve the futures of her children they end up pushed back into their family histo- ries. The last shot of Mumtaz in that film, doubled over in tears and pain after having witnessed her adolescent son shoot and kill two people, stands for the sheer helplessness that is central to the naturalist imagination. Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Cinephilia

The self-referential plots and aesthetics of recent Bollywood films have generated many forms of cinephilia: from films about films such as Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007), to films that satirize Bollywood such as Punit Malhotra’s I Hate Luv Storys (2010) and even to individual postmodern scenes such as when Chulbul Pandey (Salman Khan) interrupts a fight scene to dance to the villain’s catchy ringtone in Abhinav Kashyap’s Dabangg (2010). These are akin to the form of cinephilia we see in Heroine, which is set in the Bollywood film industry, and, in which, despite watching the self-destructive spiral of the protagonist, there is a pleasure in having access to Bollywood ‘behind the scenes’. The film plays off that voyeurism, implicating its own viewers in the media frenzy that makes life at times unlivable for its heroine. We also see Bhandarkar’s cinephilia in his own repeated cameos in some of his films. In Fashion, Bhandarkar appears very briefly in the background of a film shoot and one actress says to another, ‘He must be doing a film on fashion—he makes realistic movies.’ In Heroine, Bhandarkar never actually appears on screen but as a journalist comes out of a trailer she says, looking back, ‘Bye, Madhur’, and the protagonist Mahi asks her: ‘You were inter- viewing my director?’ In an early scene in Jail, we see a billboard for Bhandarkar’s film Corporate as the protagonist drives down a Mumbai street; and in Traffic Signal we see the lights of ‘Chandni Bar’ in the background of the Kelkar Road intersection. However, cinephilia in Bhandarkar’s films also takes another form, which is the repeated use of actors and actresses across a range of films. This is akin to the form of cinephilia by which Shah Rukh Khan plays a character named Rahul in Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001); the cinephilic pleasure lies in recognizing that the repetition of the character establishes a moral continuity that exceeds any individual film. This is a widespread practice in Hindi popular cinema but it occurs mostly with leading actors and actresses; what distinguishes Bhandarkar’s use of a repeated cast is how often he does it with minor characters and lesser stars. In fact, Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

his heroes and heroines always change from film to film but they are propped up by a repeated set of supporting actors that includes, among others, Atul Kulkarni, Manoj Joshi, Suchitra Pillai, Mugdha Godse, Shrivallabh Vyas, Rajpal Yadav, Ranvir Shorey and Naseer Abdulla. Konkona Sen Sharma and Raveena Tandon also appear in more than one film, although they both also have a lead role. But of all of these recurring actors and actresses Kulkarni and Joshi are most interesting for the nature of their roles and what they say about the politics of cinephilia in twenty-first century Bollywood. Manoj Joshi appears in seven Bhandarkar films: Satta, Chandni Bar, Aan, Page 3, Corporate, Traffic Signal and Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji. He plays very small, neutral roles in three of these: in Chandni Bar he helps Mumtaz get her son released from jail; in Corporate he plays a flamboyant film director; and in Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji he plays a waiter. Aan is his only negative role. But in the remaining three films Joshi’s roles consistently constitute a moral centre, even though in none of these is he a protagonist. His role of moral minor character suggests a logic that transcends individual films. In Satta, he plays an incorruptible police chief, so righteous that when another policeman urges him to pander to the politicians he reads him the Sanskrit slogan on the front of his police cap—‘Sadraksanāya · · Khalanigrahanāya’ or ‘To protect the good and destroy the evil.’ In · Traffic Signal Joshi plays a government engineer who refuses to be bribed to support the extension of a flyover being pushed through by a developer eager to clear the land in front of his development. While in Satta he works with Anuradha to successfully bring about justice, in Traffic Signal he is shot by a gunman hired by the local land mafia and paid off by the MLA; after his death, the flyover is constructed without hindrance. In Page 3 Joshi plays Bosco, chauffeur to one of the wealthy characters and he acts as a sort of wise subaltern who initiates a running commentary among the other drivers on the lives of the rich, revealing—in a few pithy lines of dialogue—the absurdity of the latter’s existence. Atul Kulkarni’s roles are even more developed than Joshi’s; he is the minor character par excellence in Bhandarkar’s filmogra- phy. He appears in four films—three of which are heroine-centred Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

and, thus, Kulkarni’s status as minor character is inseparable from the question of what it means to have a female protagonist in Bollywood more generally. In Chandni Bar he plays a hot- headed, passionate, but at heart kind gangster; his impulsiveness ends up costing him his life, but before that he proves to be an adequate lover for our protagonist Mumtaz. After hearing that she had been raped by her uncle he goes and stabs the uncle; and he marries her, which although does not remove her from the life of a bar dancer forever, gives her a few years of domestic respite from a world in which she is never quite comfortable. In Satta and Page 3, Kulkarni’s characters play more explicitly supportive roles for the female protagonists. In Satta, he plays a politician more righteous than most; certainly, for a majority of the film he does not seem to hold all the outdated notions of patriarchy and a woman’s place that characterize Anu’s husband, Vivek, and his parents. It is he with whom Anuradha has an extramarital affair. But he is not merely a repository for morality either. As a politician, he is presented as intelligent but also ruthless, upright but also ambitious and when he gets the opportunity to rise to the top of the party’s ranks and become chief minister he is willing to forego all of his earlier principles in order to do so. At that point, Anuradha turns against him; thus, his downfall enables her suc- cess. In Page 3, Kulkarni plays more of an outsider; as a crime reporter he provides a foil to Madhavi’s (Konkona Sen Sharma) social reporting; he is, in this way, the conscience of the film and it is only when Madhavi moves closer to his perspective—that is, when socialite reporting and crime reporting come together in the Madh Island human trafficking and pedophilia stand-off with which the film ends—that she gains some redemption from her otherwise futile work. In the uses of both these actors we see an investment in a moral order that is generally absent in Bhandarkar’s otherwise bleak and naturalistic plots. But it is notable that this morality emerges not only ‘within’ individual films but ‘across’ films (Anjaria and Anjaria 2008), suggesting that even as Bhandarkar tells realistic stories about contemporary social issues, he is attentive to the excesses of meaning that distinguish popular cinema from its Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

realist or documentary counterparts. He thus presents cinephilia as an unlikely vehicle for political film-making.

Notes

1 Corporate (2006), Traffic Signal (2007) and Fashion (2008) were all average at the box office, Heroine (2012) was below average, Satta (2003), Jail (2009) and Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji (2011) were all flops and Aan: Men at Work (2004) was a ‘disaster’. All box office rankings are from http://www.boxofficeindia.com/ (accessed 16 April 2015). 2 Sarma (2014) argues that even Corporate, which follows the 1970s theme of ‘present[ing] the industrialists … as villains’, is still very different from that generation of films in that

the film does not have even a single character who identifies with and fights for the exploited and marginalised masses. Even those characters who evoke the audience’s sympathy cannot be termed virtuous in the real sense. The sensitive characters either unquestionably become a part of the corrupt corporate world or mutely accept their subordination to that world…. Unlike the films of the 1970s and 1980s, which portray the ‘angry man,’ Corporate silences even the faint voice of opposition, and hence, ends on a completely pessimistic note. (89–90)

References

Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anjaria, Ulka and Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria. 2008. ‘Text, Genre, Society: Hindi Youth Films and Postcolonial Desire.’ South Asian Popular Culture 6 (2): 125–40. Basu, Anustup. 2010. ‘Encounters in the City: Cops, Criminals, and Human Rights in Hindi Film.’ Journal of Human Rights 9 (2010): 175–90. Chakravarty, Sumita S. 1993. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema: 1947–1987. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Chatterjee, Ishani. 2014. ‘Madhur Bhandarkar: A Different Kind of Bollywood Director.’ News House, 13 October. Retrieved 16 April 2015, Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

from http://www.thenewshouse.com/blog/madhur-bhandarkar- different-kind-bollywood-director Chatterjee, Rituparna. 2012. ‘“Heroine”: Madhur Bhandarkar’s 15 Terrible Caricatures of Bollywood.’ IBN Live, 21 September. Retrieved 4 May 2015, from http://ibnlive.in.com/news/heroine-madhur- bhandarkars-15-terrible-caricatures-of-bollywood/293828–8-66.html Garwood, Ian. 2006. ‘The Songless Bollywood Film.’ South Asian Popular Culture 4 (2): 169–83. Gopal, Sangita. 2011. Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moin, Arif. 2014, May. ‘Portrayal of Women in Hindi Films with Special Reference to Muslim Characters.’ Excellence International Journal of Education and Research 2 (5): 644–53. Naresh, Suparna and Jagadeesh Prakash. 2015. ‘Marketing Films Through Social Realities: Shyam Benegal’s “Welcome to Sajjanpur”: A Case Study.’ International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications 5 (2): 1–8. Sarma, Mriganka Sekhar. 2014. ‘Death of the Villain: Neoliberalism and Contemporary Hindi Cinema.’ The Clarion 3 (1): 84–91. Sharma, Preeti. 2014. ‘Changing Trends in Hindi Cinema: 1990–2013.’ Research Insight 1 (1): 49–57. Singh, Anita. 2014. ‘Fear of the Politics of Noah’s Ark: Technologies of Heterosexual Coercion and LGBTQIA Packaging in Bollywood Films.’ In Gay Subcultures and Literatures: The Indian Projections, edited by Sukhbir Singh, 89–110. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Srivastava, Neelam. 2009. ‘Bollywood as National(ist) Cinema: Violence, Patriotism and the National-Popular in Rang De Basanti.’ Third Text 23 (6): 703–16. Vasudevan, Ravi S. 1995. ‘Addressing the Spectator of a “Third World” National Cinema: The Bombay “Social” Film of the 1940s and 1950s.’ Screen 36 (4): 305–24.

Film References

Bhandarkar, M. 2001. Chandni Bar. Shlok Films. ————. 2003. Satta. Metalight Productions. ————. 2004. Aan: Men at Work. Firoz Nadiadwala. ————. 2005. Page 3. Lighthouse Entertainment. ————. 2006. Corporate. Sahara One Motion Pictures. ————. 2007. Traffic Signal. Madhur Bhandarkar Motion Pictures and Percept Picture Co. Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

————. 2008. Fashion. Bhandarkar Entertainment and UTV Motion Pictures. ————. 2009. Jail. Bhandarkar Entertainment, Maxwell Entertainment and Mirah Entertainment. Bhandarkar, M. 2011. Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji. Baba Arts, Bhandarkar Entertainment, Panorama Studios. ————. 2012. Heroine. Bhandarkar Entertainment and UTV Motion Pictures. Copyright © 2017. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

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