She could change expressions as quickly as clouds pass over the sun. In moments, it could change from sad, happy, adoring or scared to surprise. Her huge eyes with long lashes seem too exaggerated to be real, and when she rolls them in silliness, winks in naughtiness or fills them with tears, they are unmissable. She wrinkles her nose and pouts, bites her lip and smiles.
The mourning for Sridevi in the press and on social media is not surprising as her status as one of India’s leading female stars is undisputed. She made more than 250 films in many languages, was a child star, a diva who didn’t need a leading man to bring in audiences, a dancer, a comedienne and a great beauty. Yet the outpouring of grief has surprised those who are not familiar with her work as they assumed that a star whose major successes were 20 years ago would not have had such an impact on a younger generation. She appealed across generations and her image remained, and will remain, alive for new audiences.
THIS WEEK MY 22-year-old nephew is starting work as an intern at a think-tank in Delhi. I seem to be the most excited about all this, while he is quite calm. My friends are pulling out all the stops to ensure he has a smooth beginning to his time in India. Yet, advice is needed about things a young Brit hasn’t seen— servants, geysers, quilts (rather than duvets), bathroom taps.
Despite having directed some of the biggest actors of film and television, the 79-year-old filmmaker remains relatively unknown in India.
From Indian art films to Bollywood, British cinema and Hollywood, Om Puri straddled it all.
WE HAVE NOW passed mid-winter, the darkest day of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere, so our days are getting lighter. The Christmas lights, on trees, houses and the high street, will be coming down 5th or 6th January, depending on how you count your Twelve Days of Christmas, and soon we all begin beating ourselves up over our health, trying new faddish diets, and planning escapes to the sun.
The many obituaries of Shashi Kapoor published recently all drew attention to his quality of being a gentleman. It’s hard to think of a star for whom that would be the defining characteristic today and reflects a changing idea of the ideal male both off and on screen.
His image off and onscreen was of a sophisticated and elegant cosmopolitan, but he was also a theth Punjabi, a Kapoor, who lived life big, fond of his drink and food.
I SAID I WOULD not dare to speak on Satyajit Ray in Kolkata, the city in which he lived and which many of us know through his work. I reiterated that I wouldn’t be comfortable to work on Ray, given his deep roots in Bengali culture, in particular in its literature, of which I know little and that only in translation. Ray is an important figure to me personally as his films were the first Indian cinema I saw.
There are fewer big Bollywood hits but they are getting bigger. Last year’s Dangal surpassed all others, while the two Baahubalis, PK, Bajrangi Bhaijaan and others are lasting hits.
I WILL NEVER FORGET my heartbreak when the first school prize was announced when I was ten. It was the neatness prize for which the main criterion was good handwriting. At university, in the days before word processing, I had to read my essays aloud because of the backward- sloping scrawl. Even I couldn’t read it, much to everyone’s amusement.
All of Ray’s films share certain features not usually seen in mainstream Indian cinema.
NEVER BELIEVE ANYONE who says they don’t like dancing. It’s so much part of what it means to be human, an instinct like poetry or music. While some people must have been put off dancing for some reason or another, it’s never too late to rediscover it.
THE OVERWHELMING public support for the Supreme Court judgment on Triple Talaq may enable wider discussion of divorce in India, not just as a legal issue but about marriage itself and its breakdown. Hindi films, which are so preoccupied with love and marriage, have given little space to divorce, whose unhappiness is the antithesis of all that is celebrated in their fantasies of beauty, romance and eroticism.
Film scholar Rachel Dwyer lists 70 movies that made us laugh, cry, think, dance and debate. Go ahead and hit the rewind button for these screen classics.
WESTERNERS AND SOME Indians remain intrigued by the ‘caste system’, so I will doubtless disappoint many when I say that no such system exists. The category of caste was contested by India’s nationalist leaders in the hope it would fade, and caste discrimination, especially the practice of ‘untouchability’, was outlawed in the Constitution of India (1950). It is now reinforced by the state, which addresses it in order to enact policies of positive discrimination, known as ‘reservations’.
PK, THE ALIEN who lands on earth in the eponymous film, tries to find God in his search for his stolen transmitter. He never doubts that there is a god, and in his television debate with godman Tapasvi Maharaj, he argues that people should remember to worship the God who made us, not the one we made. In the world of cinema, where aliens believe in God, can humans be atheists?
CHRISTMAS IS THE biggest national festival in Britain. We don’t have a national day and our other public holidays have almost lost their religious associations, and even names: only us ancients speak of ‘Whit week’ (Pentecost). Easter is a long weekend but much less of an event than Christmas. I don’t think the message of death and redemption speaks to people as much as the miracle of birth and light in the darkness of a north European winter.
INDIA HAS BEEN on my mind after spending two weeks in Brazil, which I visited for the first time as co-investigator on an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK) Network Grant, ‘Cinema, soft power and the BRICS’, based in the University of Leeds, with colleagues who research Brazilian, Chinese, Russian and South African cinema.
ONE OF THE many features of the genre that draws attention to the absence of realism in Hindi cinema is the often lavish lifestyles of its protagonists. Some Indians do indeed live like this—though in a chicken-and-egg situation, I’m not sure which came first, the films or the lifestyles—but film characters endowed with inexplicable wealth is not unusual. I once asked Yash Chopra (1932-2012) why he showed such lifestyles in many of his films, and he said it was to foreground emotions without the distraction of economic or other day-to-day problems. He called this style ‘glamorous realism’. Although this has since come to be seen as normal, wealth has been portrayed in many ways in Hindi cinema.
IT SEEMED SUMMER was never going to end but the spreading crimson on the Virginia creeper on the back wall and the browning leaves on the horse-chestnuts in the park prepared us for the sudden change this weekend. Now leaves are falling and the days are shorter. The squirrels are racing around the dying garden stocking their larder for the winter, no doubt digging up my newly planted spring bulbs.
In the 21st century, Indian cinema celebrated its centenary – dated from Raja Harishchandra (1913), the first Indian feature – and the name Bollywood became established globally, perhaps less as a form of cinema than as a style and a brand of consumerism. It imagined the new India that could unleash its potential as a world leader, linked to the pride and confidence of the rising new middle classes, whose support for Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, was manifest in 2014 with the election of the BJP government of Narendra Modi.
DURING MY ANNUAL ‘Staff Development Review’, I was advised that I should take the Mental Health First Aid Course as part of my university’s commitment to reduce mental health discrimination, raise awareness and offer comfort. Many students confront issues of mental health, and I wonder whether this is due to an increase in psychological problems—often attributed to stress among the young, lack of family support and so on—or if it results from the increasing medicalisation of matters that were hitherto largely swept under the carpet. These caused vast distress to families and friends as well as the individual sufferer. I’m not a doctor (not that sort of doctor, anyway) and I’m no expert in these matters, so while I may identify the existence of a problem, I cannot treat the individual in question but pass students and colleagues onto trained professionals such as counsellors, psychotherapists and psychiatrists.
GURU DUTT’S CLASSIC Pyaasa (1957) was released ten years after Independence, and has now achieved classic status, one of the most discussed of all Hindi films. It was released the same year as Mehboob Khan’s famous Mother India, which is seen as a great nationalist epic, and BR Chopra’s Naya Daur, films which had overt political overtones connecting them to Nehruvian visions or Gandhian views.
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I HAVE A PASSION for vegetables. But don’t worry, this is not about to become a non-veg column, in which I discuss their well-known erotic associations. The only non-gastronomic vegetable pleasures I enjoy are from growing and cooking them, although I find them wondrous to behold as objects.
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Rain songs are not desirable in our damp climate. ‘Rain, rain, go away’ is more the thought than the oddly chirpy ‘Singing in the rain’. Yet rain songs in Hindi films can help us imagine what rain means in another climate, where an entire society is dependent on the life- giving annual monsoon.
Controversy and Salman Khan go together. He is always going to do something controversial and his fans are always going to support him. His father apologised for him, bolstering his image of a naïve and innocent person who is good at heart. It is odd because Salman is a 50-year-old man, so why does he need his father to apologise for him? In a way, it is also reinforcing patriarchy because it seems to suggest that if the head of the family has apologised, that should be enough. There is no need for Salman to do so.
Part of a new monthly column, ‘The Rachel Papers’, for OPEN Magazine.
‘MIDDLEBROW’ IS A putdown, a term deployed by cultural snobs, but it can be used usefully rather than pejoratively to look at the often ignored middle ground of Hindi cinema which lies somewhere between the highbrow art cinema and the lowbrow masala film.
Nargis Dutt was such a pre-eminent figure in the history of Indian cinema that her life and work are well known. Here are the 10 images I have chosen to acknowledge one of my favourite stars.
Review of Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History by Thomas R. Trautmann and Elephant Company by Vicki Constantine Croke.
On the Animals in War Memorial on Park Lane, London, two heavily laden mules approach a large curving stone wall on which are carved dogs, pigeons and other animals. An elephant features there too, which is perhaps more surprising as, although their deployment by Hannibal and by India’s princes and emperors is well known, their wartime use by the British is largely forgotten.
Sabu was the first Indian film star on the international stage. Often called Sabu Dastagir, it seems his real name was Selar Sheikh Sabu. Orphaned at seven, he followed in his father’s footsteps as a mahout in the stables of the Raja of Mysore, from where he was recruited for the Korda brothers’ first empire film, Elephant Boy, released in 1937, when he was barely 13.
The Marathi film ‘Carry on Deshpande’, which will be released on December 11, is an obvious reference to the popular British series. What were they all about anyway?
The final notice has now been posted on the Rhythm House website that the shop is closing down and the online business is going. It feels like reading an obituary notice as this old friend has been part of my bond with Indian cinema and the city of Mumbai, in particular this area of town where I risk my life as a determined pedestrian. I’ve been shopping at Rhythm House for 25 years, using it as a major resource for my research on Hindi cinema and getting to know its red-jacketed staff. My sadness is not purely personal as this also marks a shift for all of us who work on and in Mumbai, albeit one we knew was long coming as shopping practices change with the growth of malls and changes in film viewing practices and media consumption.
Hindi cinema’s genres are very loosely defined, with almost all films having a central romantic theme. It’s not just the romantic melodramas, the romcoms, the romantic action films… The typical story and structure of a Bollywood romance is that a beautiful man and woman meet, take some time to fall in love, then an unexpected crisis brings us to the interval. In the second half of the film, the plot has to find a resolution, taking the film to the full three hours.
Saeed Jaffrey was one of the few Indian actors who became as famous in the West as in his home country, and was equally loved for his popular comedies and his serious roles. He worked across theatre, film, television and radio, while taking equally seriously the role of bon vivant and playboy in his private life, as described in his 1998 autobiography, Saeed: An Actor’s Journey.
Pyaasa is usually regarded among the best Hindi films ever made, made within the conventions of Hindi cinema but which extends beyond them, the result being a film that appeals to both Indian and international audiences.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India arrived Thursday in the U.K. where, after his official visits, he will address tens of thousands of Britons of Indian origin at Wembley Stadium and elsewhere.
Some of these will have been born in India and East Africa, but many will be from families who have lived in Britain for generations. The changing views of the British Indian diaspora, and how Indians see and imagine their new global significance, have long been depicted in Hindi films — which are arguably India’s major form of public culture, now celebrated by the name Bollywood.
Salman Khan has today become the second leading Bollywood star in two years to be sentenced to a sizeable prison term, following his conviction for culpable homicide after a hit-and-run accident; this follows Sanjay Dutt’s imprisonment in 2013, also for five years, for illegal possession of weapons.
I’m often asked about which Hindi film people who’ve never seen one should begin with. Shaley remains a good choice as its clear story, quirky characters, humour and catchy songs work well. Its plot is familiar from the western, and many scenes are inspired by famous ‘spaghetti westerns’, but it blends this with elements of the Hindi film, including the songs and melodrama.
Animals who speak are found in ancient myths and fables from Aesop’s to the Panchatantra and the Jatakas, in children’s fiction, such as Kipling’sThe Jungle Book, in animated film (although Dumbo is mute) as well as in more recent tales such as the scurrilous Me Cheetah, 2009. These animals talk and think like humans, despite their nature. Novels in which the animals speak and think but not as humans are more rare – Barbara Gowdy’sThe White Bone or Richard Adams’s Watership Down. The point of view of Gravedigger, Tania James’s elephant in The Tusk That Did the Damage, forms one of the novel’s three stories, alongside those of two human narrators, Manu, the younger brother of a poacher, who seeks revenge on the elephant, and Emma, an American documentary-maker, who is defeated by the complexity of the relationships between humans as well as the elephants she has come to film.
Here, we celebrate mainstream Hindi movies – the big films that have been wowing audiences in India and beyond for more than 60 years. To find the top 100 Bollywood movies, we picked a select bunch of Bollywood experts and asked them for their favourite Hindi movies. From there, we discovered these 100 great Bollywood movies – superb films that feature the best Bollywood songs and dances. Explore, and have fun!
The 1970s saw a spate of films about men whose dostana/dosti looked at relationships between adopted brothers (Parvarish, 1958), real brothers who were separated (Waqt, 1965), and friends who became brothers (Dosti, 1964). While Raj Kapoor mourned the loss of friendship in Dost Dost Na Raha (Sangam, 1964), Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) celebrated their eternal bond, Yeh Dosti, in Sholay (1975).
Among the many myths about Indian cinema, one of the most prevalent is that kissing is banned. However, early films such as Zarina (dir. Ezra Mir, 1932), which caused such controversy it was removed from the circuits, featured 86 kisses. There is no legal prohibition on kissing in Indian cinema but it largely vanished from the 1940s until it reappeared in several films in the 1990s, perhaps the most famous being Aamir Khan and Karisma’s long smooch in Raja Hindustani (dir. Dharmesh Darshan 1996). So what happened to the onscreen kiss in those five decades?
Film academician Rachel Dwyer, whose books and essays on Hindi cinema are widely cited in film journals across the world, rues the fact that there is very little scholarship on Tamil cinema, citing it as a reason for it not receiving much attention compared to Bollywood.
Time Out Dubai: As India celebrates their Independence Day on August 15, we take a look at some pinnacle scenes from the country’s cinema throughout the decades.
The work of director Yash Chopra is one of the glories of Indian film, his career bridging the Hindi cinema of the 1950s and the globalising India of today. Rachel Dwyer pays tribute to the late Bollywood legend.
The most exciting part of any Literature festival is the speaker line-up, obviously because it adds to the quality of the sessions, but also because it gives us – the plebeians – a chance to be in the general vicinity of literary stalwarts. The thrill of running into them in say, the queue for the loo, or while wolfing down the pathooray on offer, makes the whole thing quite exciting. And the Lahore Literary Festival did not disappoint in this regard, with arguably the most star-studded line-up for a local litfest thus far, including Indian star novelist and poet Vikram Seth, American academic and author Vali Nasr, gossip columnist and novelist Shobha De, filmmaker Mira Nair, and the first local public appearance of one of our most internationally acclaimed artists Shahzia Sikandar in many years.
British-born Rachel Dwyer is an absolutely unconfused desi when it comes to her taste in films. An ardent viewer of Bollywood, Dwyer has not only followed Indian cinema through history but also — perhaps, more importantly —published a number of research papers and books. Her works, such as the 2002 biography on Yash Chopra, have endeared her to the Indian film fraternity where she is quite a known face now. Her next book, titled Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Modern India, is due out later this year.
LAHORE: “Hindi film is predicting its demise since the beginning. Every year producers who have had failures tout that the industry is finished due to television, dvds, changing technology and that there is a need to modernise. And then a Dabangg comes along. Films have to keep changing otherwise people will get bored,” said Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at The School Of Oriental and African Studies. India, Dwyer added, was the only country that preferred its own cinema and where different kinds of movies are produced to keep a diverse population happy and engaged.