Madhur Bhandarkar and the New Bollywood Social
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CHAPTER 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 quali- ties 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 aesthet- ics 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. EBSCO272 Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/21/2020 8:09 AM via UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE AN: 1452971 ; Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan, Vimal Mohan John.; Behind the Scenes : Contemporary Bollywood Directors and Their Cinema Account: unibalt Madhur Bhandarkar and the New Bollywood Social 273 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 excep- tion 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 cen- tring 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. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/21/2020 8:09 AM via UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE AN: 1452971 ; Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan, Vimal Mohan John.; Behind the Scenes : Contemporary Bollywood Directors and Their Cinema Account: unibalt 274 Ulka Anjaria 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 for- mula 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 capital- ism, 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. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/21/2020 8:09 AM via UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE AN: 1452971 ; Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan, Vimal Mohan John.; Behind the Scenes : Contemporary Bollywood Directors and Their Cinema Account: unibalt Madhur Bhandarkar and the New Bollywood Social 275 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 cor- ruption 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 domes- ticity 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.