The meaning and its 'relay'

          To put it briefly, there is a tendency in Andaz to identify each character with an 'essence' and it is this tendency in popular cinema that is usually treated with derision by critics who valorize the efforts at realism in Indian cinema:

          "…In these films abstract notions have simple human representations. Good is characteristically a young man, necessarily handsome and exceptionally virile; Good's offshoot, Vulnerable innocence, is naturally a young woman, necessarily beautiful, preferably lacking in intelligence, and helpless; Evil is usually male, also virile and necessary ugly and sometimes female and, if at all glamorous, then necessarily witch-like; Evil's offshoot, Confusion, can be male or female and preferably ugly and also untrustworthy”. (Hood 2000:3)

          The remark is rudely dismissive, but it nevertheless contains a kernel of truth in as much as it recognizes that 'character' does not develop in popular cinema, but is perceived as being present in the form of an 'essence' this supports an observation also made by Ashis Nandy about essential characteristics:

        "If the story line chooses to depict the hero as an apparent mixture of good and evil he must be shown to be essentially good, whose badness is thereby reduced to a temporary aberration”.(Nandy 1980:90)

         The issue here is not the philosophical validity of this viewpoint but how the viewpoint shows up consistently in cinema. What Indian popular cinema's more uncharitable critics don't content with is that the classical arts in India (which they are less inclined to attack) are founded on the same perceptions and this is substantiated by Indian art critics who distinguishe between traditional Indian and western art in the following way:

         "… let us take … the well-known portrait 'Christ before The Pilate’. We find here the judge sitting upon his high seat of honour, and before him the Jewish priests are making angry… complaints about Jesus. In front of Jesus, on a high pillar, there is a large statue of Caesar; at some distance from it, in a dark corner, Jesus is standing … surrounded by Roman soldiers. Rembrandt …chose for his portrayal the moment when at the end of his strivings in the cause of the religion he regarded to be true, he was discarded by his won people and brought before a Roman judge. The choice of this particular moment, though revealing the great artistic insight of Rembrandt fails to put Jesus in proper perspective …Indian artists (on the other hand) …did not lay emphasis on any passing (moment) …But tried to discover (the essence of) …The object of creation. This was perceived by them as dominating over individual moments … and could be regarded as characterizing the soul or essence of the artist's object of creation.”(S.N. Dasgupta 1954:37)

          The moment chosen by Rembrandt apparently corresponds to what Barthes (in writing about the tableau) described as a 'pregnant moment' (Barthes1977:70-71). The moment can be likened to what Barthes described as a tableau because it is suspended between Jesus Christ's life and his martyrdom, both of which surround the moment and are eliminated from the picture. The pregnant moment is poised between the past and the present and is frozen within a continuum of change, a continuum that can be likened to a perpetual resolution of binary conflicts.

          The example cited pertains to narrative and narrative constructions, but the fundamental perception has wider connotations. The following quotation is from a western sculptor who sees the 'pregnant moment' (here the equilibrium between two opposing forces) as the key moment to be captured in any artistic representation:

         "Two sculptors are carving a sphere out of stone. One of them wants to achieve the most perfect form of the sphere and sees the meaning of his work in turning a mass of stone into a perfect sphere. The other is also carving a sphere, but only to convey the inner tension expressed in the form of a sphere filled to bursting point. The first will be the work of a craftsman and the second, that of an artist”. (Berger 1969:109)

         The 'episodic' quality of Andaz means that it does not answer favorably to the Aristotelian concept of 'unity of action'. Unity of action requires that the incidents in the story should cluster around a central animating idea. A single purpose must be seen to run throughout the series of incidents, which must be so woven together that it should become evident that one incident could not have taken place without the other (Hermequin 1897:89). The central animating idea has come to represent the 'theme' in classical cinema and the theme is made to emerge only through the causation in the narrative. The factors just brought out suggest why it is difficult to identify themes in Indian popular cinema and why theme music is also noticeably absent from most of it.

          If it is difficult to identify themes in Indian popular cinema what each film has to say nevertheless emerges unequivocally and this apparently needs further explanation. Madhava Prasad draws some broad conclusions that are pertinent at this point and put very briefly, he contrasts the 'relay of meaning' in Indian popular cinema with the 'production of meaning' in classical Hollywood cinema (Prasad 1998:50-51).

         I earlier remarked that the first cause in Andaz is Neena's free upbringing, which is suggested in the very first scene of the film, and the ubiquitous 'first cause' in any film is perhaps the site of location of the transmittable meaning (Bordwell 1985:157) 2. The episodes subsequently arranged only assist in transmitting the meaning and they do not 'produce' it in the manner of the classical film. Interestingly, the plot material in a classical Sanskrit play has also been seen to be present as a seed or a germ at the beginning and grow as the action progresses (Byrski 1993:144) 3 and the first cause may correspond to this seed or germ. Since the text of a popular film is only a way of transmitting meaning to an audience, it needs a transparent language that enables it to effect the abstract signification through concrete images. In The Painted Face Chidananda Das Gupta makes an observation about how film convention supplants the 'real' in popular cinema:

          "There are a number of ways in which the popular film struggles to overcome the built-in naturalism of cinema, and to bend this medium, developed in a western technological society, towards its own, mythical style of discourse …A beard on Valmiki in the Ramayana - whether on film or on TV - is not a photographic record of a real beard on a real man; it is a photograph, but of the beard symbol of someone who is supposed, by tacit agreement between filmmaker and audience, to be a traditional sage”.(Chidananda Dasgupta 1991:54)

          The 'tacit agreement' between the filmmaker and the spectator on the meaning of each representation implies that the shape of the represented object must be fixed. The object must also be conceived and represented in a manner that makes all its attributes visible at first glance and not gradually revealed4. The specificity of the image must be employed to make an abstract signification and whatever Das Gupta notices are the ways by which this specificity is undermined and the individual made to correspond to the type.

         The titles of individual films also support the hypothesis that the text only transmits a pre-existing abstract meaning because they are abstract or symbolic words or phrases like Kismet ('Fate'), Dhool Ka Phool ('Flower in the dust'), Sangam ('Confluence), Dil Ek Mandir (The heart is a shrine) and Sholay (Flames). Their relation with the text is metaphoric and only rarely metonymic (Prasad 1998:48).

          The rules of Natyashastra also enunciate the purpose for which drama can be employed and Hindi popular films apparently follow an ancient precedent:

            "…they have deep-rooted foundations in certain traditional rules according to which drama should be a diversion for people weighed down by sorrow or fatigue or grief or ill luck; it should be a rest (for the body and the mind) - Natyashastra 113-114”( Shekar 1977:126).

          This purpose seems to explain the deliberate 'escapism' of much of Indian popular cinema because escapism is, by definition, a denial of the 'real'. Still, the explanation also finds apparent contradictions in other texts of classical Indian theory because Indian poetics does not actually treat literature as an 'autonomous' category divorced from the 'real' but actually 'truer':

           "Art is a kind of mimesis according to the rasa theory; but it is an imitation of a very special kind, for rasa does not imitate things and actions in their particularity, in their actuality, but rather in their universality, their potentiality - and this 'imitation' is said to be more real than any particular real thing” (Deutsch 1993:127)

          Whatever has been said so far about Indian popular cinema suggests that it supports an aesthetic viewpoint that corresponds to an extreme form of 'essentialism'5. The observation that it does not perceive narrative as development through conflict has already been elaborated upon. We have already seen something of the character 'stereotypes' deriving from the fixed denotative purpose of the narrative. Sanskrit drama permitted only a limited number of character-types for heroes and heroines and the same observation can perhaps also be made for Indian popular cinema although the precise number cannot be fixed in the latter case (Shekar 1977) 6. Further, it is not only heroes and heroines who are conceived as types. As an illustration, V Shantaram's Do Ankhen Barah Haath (1957) is about an idealistic jailer who sets up a farming commune with six convicted murderers. The director employs the conventions of popular cinema to represent his six characters as 'convicts' and we therefore see all six men represented in equivalent fashion, as unkempt, bearded and menacing. The same observation can be made of courtesans and widows. Popular cinema keeps widows and courtesans out of wedlock, but not because this possibility does not get social approval but because, having conceived of them in essence as widows and courtesans, it is loath to see them change. As we shall eventually see, the occasional film that breaks the convention is not more 'radical' but only one that finds a way out of a representational difficulty. The representational difficulty can be located in the identification of truths with 'essences' and the consequent disinclination to reconcile contradictions (Nandy 1980:89) 7.

          Critics of popular Indian cinema may wonder if the tendencies described bear this kind of overt intellectualization; they will ask if the 'stereotypes' cannot be simply put down to inept characterization. It must be remarked here that American films are also prone to using stereotypes, but that these stereotypes are differently conceived. To illustrate, a frequently occurring stereotype is the housewife and/or mother becoming radicalized in her dealings with the male establishment - Norma Rae (1979), Erin Brockovich (2000). Contrary to the model made familiar by Indian cinema, it is not the character that is stereotyped in Hollywood. What is stereotypical is the way he or she is allowed to develop and a familiar ploy is for a character, not a perfect specimen, to improve in the course of the narrative (Bordwell 2000) 8.

         When films have narratives spread over prolonged (although indefinite) intervals, change must somehow be accommodated, but the popular film responds by asserting that the initial condition is inviolable. In films like Vijay Bhatt's Baiju Bawra (1952) and M.S Anand’s Agneepath (1990) a child grows up to right an injustice done to his father. The child's attitude, arrested in implacability, is then carried forward completely into adulthood to furnish the narrative with its raison d 'être. When the boy grows up, the rest of the world has altered but little. The villain is not only sustained in an unsullied condition for the exclusive purpose of his vengeance, but the hero must also die after his ends are achieved because vengefulness defines him entirely. This is vastly different from the realism of Coppala's The Godfather, in which the protagonist revenges himself impassively upon his father's murderer who is now senile and beyond recollecting his victim from twenty years before. In Agneepath, vengefulness is the hero's essential condition and he may not depart from it.

          About Sanskrit drama, we learn that:

          "Sanskrit drama aims at imitating the state or condition while Greek drama imitates the action”(Shekar1977:111).

          'Imitating the state or condition' assumes a 'state or condition' as a general notion that the specificity of the actual experience cannot undo. The 'state or condition' in Sanskrit theatre has perhaps some correspondence with the pre-existing 'meaning' in the Hindi film, the message that the text, the production and the performances are specifically designed to relay to the spectator.

An Illustration

         I will conclude this paper with an illustration of the ingenious way in which an Indian film plagiarizes from a western text. Joseph Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel is a masterpiece of German psychological realism and tells the story of an authoritarian schoolteacher, who falls in love with a nightclub dancer and leaves his vocation to follow and marry her. Professor Rath is a misfit with the troupe, but he gets by doing small jobs. The narrative reaches its climax when the players return to the Professor's hometown where he is expected to perform as a clown in front of the same students he once dominated and be publicly humiliated. The Professor is dressed up to perform as a clown but he goes completely insane and attempts to kill the Master of Ceremonies. Professor Rath dies of a heart attack the next morning when he steals into the school and returns to the reassurance of his beloved school desk, where he once exercised authority.

        The Blue Angel is about a distinguished man's moral decline and the humiliation and in Pinjra (1973) V Shantaram adapts it in a revealing way. In Shantaram's film the guruji, the teacher, is a revered figure in the village. He is aghast at the way the tamasha performances are corrupting the local populace. He earns the antagonism of the dancer heroine when he tries to evict her troupe, but he gradually begins to desire her. Shantaram now introduces another local reprobate who hates the guruji but who is murdered one night outside the latter's room by the husband of a woman he once molested (when the guruji is sitting inside with the dancer). The dancer cannot give evidence exonerating the guruji in the murder because this would implicate him differently. The two, dress the dead man in the guruji’s clothes, and with the face of the corpse being disfigured, people believe that it is the guruji who is dead. But the guriji has inadvertently left his fingerprints upon the murder weapon and this will have eventual repercussions.

       The guruji now goes off with the dancers, descending further and further morally (tobacco, liquor and lust) even while his statue is worshipped in his native village. The guruji nevertheless respects the dancer's chastity and not only refuses to touch her but also gets into inconvenient fights with her clients. When he is finally required to perform and sing on the stage he actually raises to the occasion through a noble declaration of how low he has sunk and abruptly regains his original dignity. The dancer realizes her errors and understands his goodness, but he is abruptly arrested for his own murder. The people of his native village do not recognize him because he has changed in appearance and they insult and humiliate him. But the guruji bears their jibes with fortitude because of his commitment to what he once represented. The dancer dies of shock and grief when the death sentence is pronounced after his admission of 'guilt' and he goes to the scaffold courageously after a last gesture of tenderness towards her.

         Instead of portraying, as The Blue Angel does, a staunch individual’s inexorable decline and fall, Pinjra eventually affirms its protagonist's innate qualities. The changes undergone by the guruji are temporary aberrations induced by corrupt influences and he finally returns to his 'essential' moral condition when he embraces death. The heroine is allowed to change but her initial condition can be understood as mere 'naughtiness' induced by her profession and she also regains her 'true' moral stature in the end. Bollywood has often been accused of being 'unoriginal' but the example of Pinjra demonstrates how 'borrowings' must be integrated within Indian filmmaking conventions.

Notes

• The 'centrality' of Hollywood is often asserted. (Bordwell et al.1985).
• Hollywood screenplay writing manuals have long insisted on a formula and the archetypal plot consisting of an undisturbed stage, a disturbance, a struggle for the elimination of the disturbance and its actual elimination. The disturbance in classical cinema may correspond to what I termed the 'first cause' in Indian popular cinema. The difference is that the fact of the initial disturbance is not important enough to be recalled subsequently in classical Hollywood film narrative but the first cause is invoked time and again in Indian popular cinema. Neena's upbringing is brought up repeatedly in Andaz and the hero of Deewar (1975) frequently recalls the tattoo upon his forearm representing his humiliation as a child. This also supports my understanding that the meaning or the message to be relayed resides in this 'first cause'.
• It is apparent that the 'disturbance' in classical film narrative is quite different from the 'seed' that grows into the plot material in popular Indian cinema although it occupies approximately the same position in the unfolding film.
• This finds an echo in the way characters are represented in Sanskrit theatre. Here, for instance, is a description of how Vasavadatta, the heroine of Bhasa's play The Vision of Vasavadatta was conceived in a present day production. The heroine's emotions do not 'develop' through the dramatic action. They are so essentially a part of her that they are actually encoded in her costume: "Vasavadatta is the cause of the arousal …of romantic love. During the physical separation from her husband, she emotionally comes closer to him, While she is the heroine separated from her lover… she becomes completely assured of her husband's love … in spite of his second marriage during the play. Her colours in the production were gray and purplish magenta which expresses her love in separation."(Gandhi 1993).
• This is how essentialism in its extreme form has been defined: "Reifying to an immutable nature or type." Terry Eagleton (Eagleton 1966:103).
• The qualities of the hero were based on the following models: princes, brahmanas, ministers, merchants and army generals. The hero was essentially noble but he could be exalted, calm, haughty or boisterous. Heroines could be experienced, inexperienced or bold, the hero could be her first or a later love and she could be placed in eight different situations with the hero. Depending on her birth (high, middle, low) her relationship with the hero could correspond to one of 384 different types. The comic relief was provided by the vidhushaka, a jester or fool, who was ugly, uncouth, usually had protruding teeth and was a glutton.
•  Nandy notices the same characteristics, but sees them simply as a tendency to avoid 'shades of gray' in its portrayals. Nandy likens Hindi cinema to spectacle and compares it to all-in wrestling, citing Roland Barthes' celebrated essay (Barthes 1985:15-25). My own reading is obviously different. 8. David Bordwell (Bordwell 2000) also cites the personality faults routinely overcome by the protagonists in various films - shyness (While You Were Sleeping), manipulativeness (Tootsie), lack of confidence (Back to the Future), arrogance (Groundhog Day) and overconfidence (Speed).

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