I was in the thick of writing a scene for my next film with my two young and very talented co-writers. It was a defining moment in the script development. We were staring at each other, and occasionally at the blank white wall, trying to overcome a writer’s block. Suddenly, in a not ‘Eureka’ moment, one of them sprung up: Ma’am why can’t we bring in the religious sentiment?” As I contemplated this, the other quickly reacted “No way, Man. We will be mutilated either by vested interests or by the Censor Board!” That was that.
Then another idea “How about we turn this into a spectacular scene? We still don’t have a moment that we can call ‘big’” Suddenly, we were not discussing what the creative and logical progression of the scene would be, but how we could cater to the external compulsions of making a movie. How we could avoid courting controversy in a super-sensitive socio-political environment or how we could match up to the big-production films.
In 2016, the fear of oppression has only become more amplified for Indian cinema by a combination of internal and external factors. The most obvious incident was the controversy surrounding one of the biggest Hindi films, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (ADHM). A film with all the ingredients of a commercial blockbuster, ADHM also featured the sought-after Pakistani actor, Fawad Khan. And sure enough, the MNS, a Maharashtra based political party, picked on this to extract maximum political mileage in an atmosphere already vitiated by ultra-nationalism.
The party with a diminishing political representation threatened to stop the film’s release if all the scenes with the Pakistan actor were not eliminated. Of course, the same party did not call for all trade and other exchanges to be stopped with Pakistan. A highly fractured version of the original film was finally released after some extra-constitutional negotiations, arbitrated by the state government, which should have actually addressed this matter as a law and order situation.
Even in 2016, cinema was the soft target for political exploitation. Following closely on the heels of this incident, the highest court of India passed a stricture that the National Anthem must be played before the screening of films in all cinema halls across India. And the same court rejected a plea to extend this mandate to the courts themselves! Only cinema would compulsorily salute the national anthem hereafter. And then there is that unresolved conflict between creative freedom and the policing certification body that often overreaches itself to be a Censor Board.
What is it about cinema that makes it the soft target and least resistant to such political bullying? One of the trends of Indian cinema has been the dominance of Bollywood both in terms of the structure and volume of business and as the face of Indian cinema in mainstream international circuits.
In 2016, it was the big Bollywood actors and producers such as Salman Khan, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan, who occupied at least 50 percent of the market space. Although the narrative of the film Bahubali was in the sensibility of Telugu cinema, its marketing pitch was that of a film with technological wizardry for a pan-Indian audience.
And even the south Indian director, Shankar, launched the audio of his technologically-driven Robot sequel in Mumbai. The strategy has therefore been to rehash a predictable narrative with new packaging, employ viable stars and crew, and combine this with aggressive marketing to somehow recover costs within a week of release. With such an obvious emphasis on the size, scale and business of film making, Bollywood has been willing to compromise content and creative integrity to fulfil its big business targets. And politicians have used this vulnerability for their own promotion. However, at least 50 per cent of the big films, such as Mohenjodaro and Mirzya, have failed at the box office, and not all the box office hits had returns in proportion to their costs and marketing visibility. Even a film like Befikre, which catered unabashedly to the ‘commercial’ dimension, did average business. Salman Khan’s Sultan was the exception, but experts and critics observe that this is precisely because this superstar moved out of his comfort zone to tell an unconventional story, at least by Bollywood standards.
The trends of 2016 reiterated that content ought to be the hero of a film. And yet, hardly any small-budget film from the Hindi stable worked at the box office because they could not match the production and marketing capacity of the big players.
Regional cinema, on the other hand, has been able to synergize the more avante garde genre and commercial success. For example, the Marathi film, Sairat, made by a hitherto commercially unsuccessful director and with unknown actors, matched Bollywood in its commercial success. In Tamil, Kodi, a ruthless depiction about how politics is played, had two mainstream actors, Dhanush and Trisha, in unconventional roles and it triumphed at the box office. But even regional films are increasingly threatening to be bitten by the Bollywood paradigm of being bigger in form but predictable in content.
Will 2017 draw lessons from 2016 and make that much needed paradigm shift from the rhetoric of the big budget star-based extravaganzas to more cutting edge story-telling? Indian cinema is crying for that shift but the entire system comprising financers, producers, directors and actors need to hear that cry. The audiences are ready and waiting.
(The author is a film director whose debut film won a national award)
