In the popular imagination, Bollywood in the 1980s was all about garish aesthetics, frenetic editing, double entendres, and melodrama underlined by blaring sound effects. You might think of Sridevi wearing shiny outfits and shimmying amid matkas or Mithun karate chopping goons. The overwhelming feeling is that of cinematic flash and trash. As Baradwaj Rangan has noted in an essay “[the] perceived wisdom is that Hindi cinema in the 1980s sucked”.
This specious dominant narrative is undercut in National Award-winning film writer Avijit Ghosh’s latest book When Ardh Satya Met Himmatwala. Even as Ghosh admits early on that “hundreds of shallow conveyor-belt movies swarmed theatres,” he approaches this era with the devotion of a cinephile. Many of his early reels (as Ghosh cutesily titles his chapters) lay out the economic and political climate of the time: the number of homes with televisions dramatically rose from a million at the start of the decade to over twenty million at its end; large scale video piracy changed the ways in which Hindi films were being viewed; Dawood’s D-Company created a pirate monopoly that controlled master copies of various Bollywood films and distributed them for sale and rent through video parlours across the country; broadcasts of one-day cricket matches lured millions of Indian viewers to sports television; and evening serials like Hum Log kept the middle-class glued to TV screens. As a result of all this, Ghosh notes, cinema became a “goulash” tossing in songs, fights, chase sequences and semi-erotic scenes to hold on to its audience. Sudhir Mishra, who is quoted in the book, succinctly lays it all out: “Single screens were deteriorating. Multiplexes had not yet arrived. The middle class had stopped going to cinema halls. The nature of money coming into cinema was gradually changing. The stars had taken over. And the cost of filmmaking could no longer be justified by its revenues.”
Ghosh’s book is especially successful when it taps into the Bollywood formula of the underdog versus authority figures. Readers will enjoy the chapter on the 31-day film strike industry strike of 1986, when the entire industry banded together to protest a 4% sales tax hike targeting film production. The descriptions of Amitabh Bachchan’s late intervention in bringing an end to the strike is amusingly narrated.
{{/usCountry}}Ghosh’s book is especially successful when it taps into the Bollywood formula of the underdog versus authority figures. Readers will enjoy the chapter on the 31-day film strike industry strike of 1986, when the entire industry banded together to protest a 4% sales tax hike targeting film production. The descriptions of Amitabh Bachchan’s late intervention in bringing an end to the strike is amusingly narrated.
{{/usCountry}}Ghosh reminds us that Bollywood has always been deferential to the political centre. Feroz Khan’s Qurbani, the highest grossing film of 1980, which released around the time of Sanjay Gandhi’s death begins with a visual tribute that refers to him as the “sleeping prince”. Hindi cinema was seen as the popular face and ideological arm of the centre. As a result, Hindi film screenings were banned, at various points, in Tamil Nadu, parts of West Bengal, and Kashmir during this period.
Despite all the churn, auteurs and artistes also collaborated on vibrant new wave films that screened at prestigious film festivals and found audiences in India and overseas. Mani Kaul’s Satah Se Utthata Aadmi (1980), a philosophical and episodic take on the modernist Hindi poet Mukhtibodh was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. Rabindra Dharmaraj’s Chakra (1981) about slum-dwellers in Bombay won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and became a surprise box office success in India. The NFDC (National Film Development Corporation of India) played a key role within the production cycle of parallel cinema, partially financing several award-winning and box office hits including Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983), Mirch Masala (1987) and Salaam Bombay (1989).
Unfortunately, by the final chapters, When Ardh Satya Met Himmatwala reads like a series of well-edited Wikipedia pages. Moreover, Ghosh doesn’t fully deliver on the tantalising promise of a title that bridges the chasm between politically astute dramas like Ardh Satya and “disposable” commercial blockbusters like Himmatwala. The reader, instead, has to scour for clues beneath the surface from anecdotes like those from the production of Saaransh (1984), the sensitive drama about two elderly parents dealing with the death of their only son. On one side was seasoned producer Tarachand “Sethji” Barjatya, the founder of Rajshri Productions whose films exemplified Hindu family values. And on the other was Mahesh Bhatt, the critically acclaimed upstart whose works were unflinching in their examination of social mores. As Bhatt tells Ghosh, “The movie said there’s no rebirth. All you have is this life. This went against Sethji’s beliefs.”
LISTEN MORE: Books & Authors podcast with Avijit Ghosh, author, ‘When Ardh Satya Met Himmatwala’
Ghosh’s filmic knowledge is impeccable and dizzyingly vast, which is why I wish he’d spoken more to the sceptics than to those of us who already pray at the altar of Bollywood. In the 1980s, ethereal visions such as Mandakini bathing under a waterfall in Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) were undercut by bleak ones like Hema Malini turning to dacoity in Sitapur ki Geeta (1987). It’s the very tussle between the present and the past, rationality and faith, prestige and the lowbrow, the intellectual and the sensory that enlivens all the debates around Bollywood. When Ardh Satya Met Himmatwala offers us razzle-dazzle but not a lot of meditation.
Karthik Shankar is a writer and editor from Chennai.