Is Bollywood losing its way?

There are three institutions I love in India. The first is the informal economy. Survival would be impossible without it and subsistence would not be an art form without its creativity. The second subculture I love is the culture of food, the sensorium of smells and tastes that make India the greatest civilisation around cuisine. The third

institution is Bollywood. It is silly, ridiculous, illogical, but so wonderfully representative of India that Indian identity would be bereft without its inventions. I worry about the future of all three but Bollywood in particular worries me. It is an early warning signal about the folklores of our mind.
Bollywood is a myth. It is a myth of the unity of India, a myth built around a kaleidoscope of varieties from the idea of the nation, to the legend of the mother, to the ultimate resolution of violence. Myths are hardworking genres. They seek a unity of narrative by resolving contradictions or at least by papering over them. If you cannot solve a problem, one must at least make it tentatively livable, even if the resolution sounds like an unbelievable wishlist. Bollywood as myth has worked out great contradictions, from the opposition of town and country, family loyalty versus professional code, between domesticity, marriage and the idea of sexual freedom. Think of Mother India, Amar Akbar Anthony, Sholay, Yaadon ki Baraat, Do Bigha Zameen, Zanjeer, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, Kaho Na Pyar Hai or Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. Of course, some of the resolutions were unbelievable but miracles and hope are the glue of Indian life. For all our belief in science and IT, prayer is still seen as more effective. Nandan Nilekani is effective but a civilisation needs a Sai Baba and Ramana Maharshi for its moment of crisis.
There is a disquiet about Bollywood that I need to articulate. It is not a socio-economic disquiet about the new theatres. I am worried that Bollywood as myth is losing its power and potency. I am not reducing it to bad scripts. The loss is more magical.
The old contradictions that sustained our life and provided the humus for the Bollywood imagination sounds stale. The question of town versus country or law versus family brings a yawn. There are new issues like the diaspora, terror, sexuality, the growing role of women, the changing ideas of sexuality. I think the old forms of resolution do not work. Most movies get caught in scripts which fail to have a resolution. The trouble with Bollywood is that resolutions must involve the new and something too radical is seen as alien, something too orthodox is considered passé.
Consider the movies on the diaspora. The diaspora was both a mirror and a lens. We saw it as an Indian possibility. America was just another place for the Indian diaspora to enact Indian dream in American costumes. We loved change, but throughout all the change the diaspora had to remain loyally Indian. Where that formula worked, the movie worked as in K3G, Kaho Na Pyar Hai, Kal Ho Na Ho. As long as we remained Indian at heart, we could be citizens of any state. Singh is Kinng is a perfect example. It reminded me of an earlier diasporic movie that failed — Kaante. There is memorable line where a character says: as a diaspora we have succeeded in everything except in crime. The Italians have their Mafia. The Chinese have their Tongs, the Columbians have their drug rings but we Indians have failed to dent crime. Singh is Kinng overcomes even that failing, but not convincingly. Crime is diasporic but our gangs go global only between Mumbai and the Gulf as Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai successfully showed. Crime and violence need an Indian embeddedness to resolve. Abstract evil eludes our imagination. Caricatured you get a bomb called Raavan, or gets reduced to the ludicrousness of Tees Maar Khan.
There is a sense that something about the diaspora is not quite resolvable. The sexuality, the violence, the way of life cannot be completely reduced to Indian values. Nostalgia does not work. Women need freedom of a different kind. Marriage and family do not resolve everything. Anjaana Anjaani is a good example of a movie which is inarticulate about the diaspora.
Our sense of melodrama is also limited. It can extend to family melodramas. It can go as far as Paa but any sense of illness is still restricted to cancer or some variant of that. The idea of euthanasia is still too alien. Euthanasia can be practised in secret but it’s not publicly acceptable. The rational handling of disease or violence is beyond us. We cannot make a convincing movie about AIDS or terror. We still turn disease into a form of eccentricity.
Small movies do not provide solutions to these problems. They become cameos memorable in themselves. They are fragmentary as imaginations. We need the big, the large, the banal and the average to create the stuff of Bollywood drama. Therefore constructs like A Wednesday, Dhobi Ghat are seen as sensitive. Sensitive is a “Hindi” word which means meaningful but in small doses. A sensitive movie is not an epic blockbuster. No One Killed Jessica has to move beyond documentary. Myth that moves to realism or sociology loses its shelf life.
Let me give a contrary example. Rajnikanth movies have a tremendous sense of myth and their resolution. Sivaji has this wonderful fragment on colour and character which is an answer to the Fair & Lovely ads. Robot is our real science-fiction movie in the way it integrates technology and the body, playing out what is human. Bollywood, I am afraid, is missing the bus on myth.
Think of the one movie that everyone is talking about: Dabaang. It is the oldest of formulas — a cop movie, what someone dubbed as Bollywood’s mimicking of Bhojpuri films. The plot is weak. What sustains it is a cameo. In fact, it is the intersection of two cameos, from two different films. It follows the question: Munni or Sheila? But Munni or Sheila is a very Bollywood question. Since Bollywood scripts have failed as myth, fans and publicity agents have created a myth by collaging two movies. It asks questions at a populist level between two forms of Bollywood dance, where sexuality is formulated twice. In one the sheer effervescence of the old is played out with a cast of effervescent stereotypes. In the other a diasporic image gyrates offering a different sense freedom. One offers a sense of prohibition and licence, the other the new found freedom even naiveté of Sheila. But in its very moment of celebratory populism, it realises that myth has exhausted itself. There is no deep contradiction. Munni or Sheila is Bollywood’s happy way of signalling emptiness, waiting to stumble on new meaning.
One is waiting for a return to deeper meaning, to melodrama with greater stamina, to life which knows there are no easy solutions.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist