IV- Bollywood as Social Commentary

Something which I should have made clear at the end of the Bollywood III blog was a link to this blog but after deliberating on the choices, I decided to do otherwise.

One of the primary reasons was that this would have tempted many of the comment makers to seek more time for input. The other reason was that I did not wish to prejudice any one with my judgements.

No list of Bollywood movies is complete without certain additions to that list. As would be underscored by the following paragraphs, these are not essentially Bollywood movies, yet these are inexorably linked to the Indian social mores and ethos.

One of the finest INDIA centric movies, sociologically speaking, is Bandit Queen. Since this has been produced by BBC, would it fall under Bollywood, I am not sure of that. Shekhar Kapur has created a marvellous commentary on the life of socially underprivileged by using the life story of Phoolan Devi as the leitmotif for that purpose.

No words can be used to describe the pain of the lady- who gets repeatedly assaulted by the gang boss in the badlands of Chambal and parts of Central India – with whom she gets associated by a quirk of fate. The piercing cries haunt the soul.

The social consequences of rebellious actions as enunciated by the character of Vikram Malla are superbly juxtaposed against the backdrop of the power hierarchy even in criminal enterprises. ¨Kill one person from Thakur community and that would be considered a murder. Kill the whole village of Thakurs and that would be social revolution. Government will have to come to terms with you.¨

When the caste characteristics are so imbibed in social structures that even the converted Christians continue to refer to the caste appendages three or four generations after conversions, would we Indians be able to ever overcome the prejudices thus generated.

The second India centric movie not produced in Bollywood but which cannot go without mention is the one which earned an Indian artiste the first Oscar. YES, Bhanu Athaiyya for Gandhi. Probably the subject itself was so wonderfully relevant to human conditions that it had to win big at Oscars.

Would that complete the list! I guess not. Probably we can never come to terms with the poverty in India- at least not yet in any case- but the pathos of poverty as captured by movies of Satyajit Ray or Ritwick Ghatak should give us some hope. At least we Indians are reacting to the state of affairs in our country- unlike our neighbours all around us- who can only use the poverty and apathy that the status of poverty generates to create mayhem by utilising the faultiness that exist in social structures.

I watched a movie from Thailand with my Thai and Veitnamese classmates in Montreal in the summer of 2005. And I am not ashamed to say that I was shamed by their knowledge of HANUMAN, the monkey God, for they knew some aspects of his life more than I did at that point of time. The movie seemed like any typical Bollywood movie – only the location was Bangkok and the language used was Thai- as were the actors portraying the characters in the movie.

It was then that I realised how closely India was related to South East Asian nation states. It was during one such interaction with the Thai classmates that I realised that the Thai script is eerily similar to Oriya script.

It is possible that people from Indian landmass have crossed the Bay of Bengal to interact and influence the people in South East Asia. And vice versa could be case too. We Indians have probably been influenced by our South East Asians cousins as well.

Does anyone thus think it to be a matter of wonderment that Bollywood continues to be a major source of soft power that is at the disposal of Indian policy makers. Only the country has yet to learn to utilise all the power at its disposal.