Bollywood Bourgeois Author(s): Rachel Dwyer Source: International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, India 60 (WINTER 2006-SPRING 2007), pp. 222-231 Published by: India International Centre Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23006084 . Accessed: 07/11/2013 09:20

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Bollywood

Bourgeois

cliche of Indian cinema being the domain of the escapist fantasies of the Indian masses can now be safely put to rest. While this may have been true for The the 1980s, when the study of Indian cinema began to grow, the present cinema audiences, who are willing to pay Rs. 200 and upwards for a cinema ticket, are from various sections of the Indian middle classes and elites. These classes now dominate the public sphere in India and film is one of the major media which they are producing and consuming. It is possible to trace links between the rise of the new middle classes in the 1990s and contemporary changes in cinema.

The early Indian cinema, though often scorned by elites, was not a primarily lower class form. Many of those who worked in early cinema came from educated elites, such as , or mercantile backgrounds such as Chandulal Shah and most of the

ByRachel Dwyer

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'Chairs' by . owners of , Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietones. However, other studios, such as Prabhat, were more socially mixed and actors themselves were also diverse, and some were clearly associated with dancing traditions linked to prostitution and other dubious origins, while others, such as and , came from highly respectable families. This social mixture continues in the Indian up to the present. There is no major ethnography of Indian cinema audiences. We know most about silent cinema because of the Enquiry of 1927-8. Although the majority of those interviewed were elite, we get some wider views of how the audiences were perceived at this time, and talk of masses and female audiences. We can also see that the upper class ignored film, in particular non-English films, for many years as cinema was not seen as an important cultural form. However, we recognize that the social background of those making the films and their audiences was varied. We know from the writings

: Courtesy: Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai: Kitsch and the Contemporary Imagination / Gallery Espace : 223

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of B.R. Chopra, and others studying in elite colleges in Lahore, that cinema was a passion, though often forbidden by their families.

As few, if any, histories have been written of the development of India's middle class, we can instead focus on them over the last 15 years. It is hard to define exactly what is meant by 'middle class' in any culture. Even if we define the middle class in India as those who are tax-payers, the numbers are not clear. However, they are undoubtedly a powerful force if only in terms of their size, which is said to be as great as 100 million or 10 per cent of the total population, but is more probably four million households or 25 million people.1 They have also become far more visible as the result of a series of government policies in the 1990s. At the beginning of India's economic liberalization in 1991, there was a widespread belief that the Indian middle classes were increasing in number and in wealth. Whether 25 or 100 million, this represented an enormous market primed for an influx of goods. However, India is getting richer and income is rising overall, but distribution of income is getting more disparate. India's consumer - spending power is only a thirtieth of that of the USA that is the size of one small American state. However, straightforward numerical conversion of currency can be misleading in that the rupee may be low in terms of exchange, but its purchasing power in India is higher especially given the cost of labour. A more useful way of examining India's middle classes is by looking at their lifestyles and consumerist behaviour. Bourdieu's analysis of taste in French society2 has certain problems in the Indian context for unlike France, which has a clearly defined 'French culture' created by the bourgeoisie, India has a plurality of cultures, further complicated by postcolonialism and the relationship to Western culture. However, the national bourgeoisie has created one hegemonic version of Indian culture, perpetuated through - government organizations academies, universities, museums, etc. - which, I argue, has attacked the new middle classes largely on the grounds of taste.

Rachel Dwyer

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Bourdieu argues that taste is part of a struggle for social recognition or status, in which lifestyle plays a key part, emphasizing cultural consumption rather than production. Taste is defined by the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, who have economic capital in terms of income, employment status, etc. They impose their taste in order to establish their cultural legitimacy, to 'define the legitimate principles of domination, between economic, educational or social capital'.3 Thus the bourgeois aesthetic becomes cultural capital, seen as being inherent in the bourgeoisie rather than learnt or acquired. The bourgeoisie define what legitimate culture is and other sections of the population are seen to be lacking in taste, liking what is 'middlebrow' or 'popular'. In Bourdieu's terms, the petit bourgeoisie has to strive to differentiate themselves from those who are below them in the social hierarchy, but they may lack the education to acquire the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. I wish to emphasize that I do not regard the idea of cultural legitimacy as totally arbitrary and beyond any aesthetic definition, but I see it as a useful working model in a social rather than purely textual analysis. While India has long had what we can now call the 'old middle classes', mostly highly educated professionals, the last century saw the emergence of new middle classes. This group is highly visible socially: located at the upper end of the economic spectrum, they - have non-landed wealth although many now have wealth from - property inflation which they use for their patterns of relatively high consumption, and they speak English as one of their major languages. They are also avid producers and consumers of much of India's public culture, in particular that of the Hindi cinema. They are now also setting their own definitions of what is culturally legitimate, contesting the values of the old middle classes. This cultural conflict has led to the almost hysterical rejection of the culture of the new middle classes that I have looked at elsewhere.4 The new middle classes would largely reject the term 'middle class' that in India refers more to the lower middle classes. They refer to themselves as 'upper class'; the professional middle classes call them the 'nouveau riche'. Yet they are located culturally within the middle classes, having largely risen from the lower middle classes, to create a new space in the middle classes, separate from the grands bourgeoisies and the old middle classes. Many would argue they actually constitute an elite, in terms of economics and because they

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are mostly drawn from the upper castes, and that they are in no way 'middling'. Yet they are contesting the middle ground, the centre of Indian life.

The old middle classes are associated with realist cinema, including the 'art' cinema associated with and the 'parallel' cinemas that emerged during the 1970s. This cinema, like middle class cinema in the West, has favoured realism over melodrama and has usually depicted with most sympathy the lower middle classes, mostly shown struggling in the cities, as well as the rural poor and zamindari classes. Realist films, such as those of , were concerned with caste, class and gender, while made films about corruption and the struggle to remain human in such settings. There was also a transitional cinema which developed during these years, made by , , B.R. Chopra and , which can be located as having the realism of art cinema while sharing features with commercial cinema, in particular the use of . During the 1980s, much of this audience switched its allegiance to television, as mainstream cinema became the preserve of the male urban working-class audience. It was in the 1990s that the middle class audience was tempted back to cinema as the mainstream cinema returned to romance and music, with new young stars, fresh marketing strategies and the theatre buildings were improved. The mainstream cinema seemed primarily concerned with the social values of the new middle classes. The commercial cinema has a varied audience that is drawn from a wide social spectrum. While its films manifest a mixture of class tastes, some having the lower or working classes as its major social referent, others share middle-class values in their depiction of the couple and of the bourgeois family. It is in the commercial cinema that the new middle classes are establishing their cultural hegemony, their depictions of lifestyle becoming those to which the lower - - classes aspire hence its appeal to a broad social spectrum and also its rejection by the old middle classes. Ashis Nandy argues that commercial cinema puts an emphasis on

Rachel Dwyer

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... lower-middle-class sensibilities and on the informal, not

terribly-tacit theories of politics and society ... and the ... ability to

shock the haute bourgeoisie with the directness, vigour and crudity of these theories.5

He suggests that this cinema is a reading of the haute bourgeoisie by the lower middle classes. This explains the medium's stylization, grandiloquence, conventions and mannerisms, and the fantasy of a peasant or rural past as a lost paradise, with fears of the city and its concomitant amorality. In my reading, this is a depiction of the culture espoused by the new middle classes, which may be close to that of the lower middle classes, but differs from it in that its consumerist lifestyle opportunities are those of the rich. The old middle classes may well see this reading as mimicry of their culture, hence their scorn of the medium, which they regard as a low-brow way of looking at a whole range of values, anxieties, lifestyles and Utopias. They find commercial cinema

... shamelessly rustic and blatantly cosmopolitan [its world] neither

authentically traditional nor genuinely modern, a meeting of the 6 mass and the popular.

Nandy deftly sums up this attitude:

An average, 'normal', Bombay film has to be, to the extent possible,

everything to everyone. It has to cut across the myriad ethnicities

and lifestyles of India and even of the world that impinges on

India. The popular film is low-brow, modernizing India in all its

complexity, sophistry, naivete and vulgarity. Studying popular film

is studying Indian modernity at its rawest, its crudities laid bare by

the fate of traditions in contemporary life and arts. Above all, it is

studying caricatures of ourselves ...

The popular cinema may be what the middle class, left to itself,

might have done to itself and to India, but it is also the disowned

self of modern India returning in a fantastic or monstrous form to haunt modem India.7

These films are often 'escapist' but the nature of these escapist fantasies need to be examined seriously if we are to determine what

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people want to escape from and escape to. The movies in question are concerned with social mobility, fantasies of wealth and, in particular, with ideas of consumerism linked closely with romance. In recent years, Indian cinema has been made acceptable by this middle-class audience, while journalists and academics study the commercial mainstream. There has been little time to note some of the major changes that the cinema is undergoing today as typified by the middle-class multiplex audience. The diasporic (Non Resident Indian) audience is increasingly important not just for box-office returns, but also for influencing the producers' decisions. A greater variety of films is being made and new genres are beginning to crystallize. The 1990s were dominated by the Yash-Raj-style of film-making, also popularised by , in which a style of 'glamorous realism' was promoted in extravagant romances. However, in recent years, Yash-Raj have changed not only their production style to include the work of many young directors, but have also made new genres including action films (, ), war films (Kabul Express), films about political issues such as Partition (Veer Zaara) and Kashmir (Fanaa), romances which raise contemporary social issues such as love outside marriage (Hum Turn and Salaam Namaste), as well as crime-caper films (). Other studios, such as Mukta Arts, are producing realist, middle-class cinema such as that of , while Ronnie Screwvala, who has worked in several media, creates a stir with each UTV release; and English language films such as Being Cyrus have had great acclaim. The world-class cinema of has appealed to mainstream audiences and to the old middle classes, and would surely be the long-awaited 'crossover' film. has successfully adapted Shakespeare into realistic Indian settings in films such as and Omkara, which seem to be aimed squarely at educated audiences. In 2006, among several low-brow comedies, the major hits are worth noting. The biggest hit, Dhoom 2, is a young, action-packed film showing well-off youngsters in glamorous clothing moving around the world without many family ties. Rang De Basanti picked up on youth ennui and a political consciousness raised by staging the story of Bhagat Singh. These films contain middle-class values,

Rachel Dwyer

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meaning the audience are not necessarily middle class but may be aspiring to join their ranks. However, a whole body of lower-class cinema has barely been discussed. Much of this market lies with B-movies, shown mostly on VCD: of religion, sex, horror and other genres. Some of the most popular of these B-movies have been made in Bhojpuri, and cater to a specific lower-class audience. Even in the mainstream a certain type of declasse film has become popular, mostly in low-grade, if not crude, comedies.

Although the central concern here is with film, the other media are also changing. The media have been a major place to study the rise of mall and shopping culture, consumerism, advertising and other such activities of the middle classes and their aspirants. Television programming is now aimed at the lower middle and working classes with a few exceptions, such as news bulletins. The majority of the programming has little appeal to educated middle classes as it consists mostly of soap operas, reality TV and various competitions, with little serious drama, documentary and educational public service broadcasting. Other media, from newspapers to internet sites, are also participating in the rise of celebrity and tabloid culture, while social comment, op-eds, and more high-brow forms are increasingly found in news magazines. The overseas media, from films to television channels, are now more freely available and often preferred by the educated classes. It would be wrong to view all of Hindi cinema as middle class, but the cultural referent of this cinema is increasingly that of these social groups. This does not imply that the entire audience for this cinema is middle class, but the values of this group are becoming increasingly dominant, certainly in urban and mofussil India. It seems to be a two-way interaction between the films and society and, as mainstream films begin to be shown more cheaply through digital formats, their reach is likely to increase. In the last decade, the position of India within the world and global trends in consumerist habits and culture have shifted from fantasies to real possibilities and this is clear in recent hit films, such as Dhoom 2, full of frothy fun, consumerist fantasies of travel, clothes and lifestyle that can be

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enjoyed by the gym-toned global Indian youth who moves freely around the world. However, a film which reached out to all social groups was Lage Raho Munnabhai. Why did this work where others have not? Perhaps this is because it is one of the few to represent a national fantasy, accessible to all classes and ages. The film also marks a recuperation of Gandhism as an Indian way of thought, albeit originally hybridized from global influences. Although Gandhi himself was famously anti-consumerist, his other values remain strong; even the most avid consumers in India put religion and family first and which they consume as Hindus and as family. This is the Hindu model of consumption. Even though the hero is a gangster he has the right aims even if wrong means, and his conversion to Gandhian Satyagraha marks his finding his goals in life and raises an important question: is there really a possibility of an ethical (Gandhian?) consumerist middle class?

: ENDNOTES

1. Figure from the Economic Times of India, quoted by Rajagopal, 1999:91. 2. Bourdieu, 1984.

3. Bourdieu, 1984:254.

4. See particularly Dwyer, 2000.

5. Nandy, 1998:2.

6. Nandy, 1998:12.

7. Nandy, 1998:7.

: Rachel Dwyer

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REFERENCES

Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Dwyer, Rachel, All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love: sex and romance in modern India, London: Cassell, 2000.

Dwyer, Rachel, 'Real and Imagined Audiences: Lagaan and the Hindi film after the 1990s.' Etnofoor, 15 (1/2) December, Special Volume: 'Screens':177-193, 2002.

Dwyer, Rachel, 100 Bollywood Films, London: British Film Institute, 2005.

Nandy, Ashis (ed.), The Secret Politics of our Desires: innocence, culpability and popular cinema, London: Zed Books, 1998.

Rajagopal, Arvind, Thinking about the New Indian Middle Class: gender advertising and politics in an age of globalization', in Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (ed.), (1999) Signposts: gender issues in post-independence India, New Delhi: Kali for Women: 57-100, 1999.

Rajagopal, Arvind, Politics after Television: Hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927-8. Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, 1928.

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