Bollygood Stereotypes

Bollywood stereotypes have always been magnified versions of ourselves. In tracking 10 that have changed, JERRY PINTO tells us things — both encouraging and alarming—about our society

THE MORE Bollywood changes, the more it stays the same. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is to admit that it is the popular culture of note in this country; that it is still patriarchal and insensitive to issues of gender and sexuality and community, but that it has also been forced to change.

For example: When did you last see a Bollywood daddy come to the head of the winding staircase in a wine-red robe and declare, “Yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti”?

When did you last see a Bollywood mummy grab her son by the arm and, in a voice flooded with tears, implore, “Mera suhaag bacha lo beta”?

When did you last visit a villain’s den with a resident crocodile, a pool of pink acid — or even a pole on which to twirl the hero into submission?

When did the heroine last throw herself on the bed and weep because she had been offered a blank cheque on her happy bir-day?

When did the hero last spread his legs, bend one knee, point into the sky and yodel?

Tell the truth. There’s even a bit of you that misses them. They were the old tropes of a cinema that now seems addicted to kitsch. Then, when God appeared on screen, he wore a mukut and was barechested and, in order to prove he was God, he skipped from the left to the right of Sanjeev Kumar in KS Sethumadhavan’s Yehi Hai Zindagi. Today, God wears a three-piece suit and has a bunch of kudis as his board of directors. And it wasn’t Amitabh Bachchan playing God; not even Amar Singh; it was Rishi Kapoor in Kunal Kohli’s Thoda Pyaar, Thoda Magic.

One reason for this change is the DVD revolution. In Kerala, you can get Wong- Kar Wei for Rs 30. In Mumbai, Parajanov for a 100 bucks. In Bangalore, there’s an unnamed young lawyer who dumped hundreds of downloaded DVDs to kickstart the piracy market. In Palika Bazar, you can get all of the above and more.

Another is the presence of an international audience. Says Dr Sudha Rajagopalan, author of the engaging and informative Leave Disco Dancer Alone: Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-Going after Stalin, “The Hindi film is now a spectrum of genres and its makers come from a variety of backgrounds; so they now try to address a greater diversity of audiences than they used to. What I have seen over the last decade are lead protagonists who get to play romantic superheroes but still others who articulate small-town ambition, foreground minority identities, critique consumerism, interrogate political apathy and accommodate (even if only discreetly) gayness. I think Hindi films continue to be very socially engaged, and have only replaced the earlier ‘socialist’ concerns about class disparities and middle-class hypocrisy of the 50s films with a new interest in a wider range of identity politics in contemporary India.”

Here, we’ll look at some stereotypes that we’ve grown to take for granted — and at the changes that have happened to them. They may tell us a little more about ourselves, some of it encouraging, some alarming.

THE HERO

Big man, small fears Saif Ali Khan fears a foetus in Salaam Namaste

IT BEGAN IN Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela. “Kya kare, kya na kare, yeh kaisi mushqil hai” sang Munna (Aamir Khan), wondering at his inability to take the step that separated friendship from love. An era of uncertainty was born: the man was no longer top dog but a somewhat lovelorn puppy.

But it was the rise of Yashraj and his young Turks that redefined cinema. Just as Yash Chopra had rewritten the romantic film, insisting on lush locales, the perfect sari, Lata Mangeshkar keening in the background and the air frosty with sugar candy and icicles, the young men in his stable began rewriting the hero.

“The hero has become less of an epic hero — unless it’s a super hero movie — and more of a low-key, low-intensity friendly neighbourhood patriarch,” says Rahul Srivastava, popular culture enthusiast and urban studies scholar. “I’m thinking of Munnabhai, for instance. But patriarch he remains. The male figure reigns supreme even when the narrative is women-oriented, as in old-fashioned films like Damini or Lajja. This extends to Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na: the tests for his machismo — riding a horse, going to jail and beating someone up — are played against the socialisation that his mother [Ratna Pathak-Shah] is trying to enforce. It takes the logic that Rangeela initiated to its conclusion.”

Before Bollywood was born, the hero was the lover. Amitabh Bachchan turned him into a warrior. For 20 years, he and all the men around him, waged single-handed war against evil, playing out the Ramayana again and again. Now, the pendulum is swinging back to the lover.

Only this time, no one is quite sure what kind of lover is needed.

When Munna took Milly (Urmila Matondkar) in his arms at the end of Rangeela, we knew this was a triumph of the proletariat. The rich and successful Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff) lost her to love. This was the standard trope of Hindi cinema. The rich boy had everything — including blank cheques for his birthday — except love. The poor girl has nothing except a loving family. (Raj Kapoor’s Bobby may be the prototype.) He raises her to his caste and class position in a process of Sanskritisation called anuloma. (Marriage in the natural way of things. Pratiloma is marriage against the grain.) Now, we don’t know who’ll win.

Srivastava is fascinated that the hero is no longer the little guy. The tramp is now firmly dead. Just as America replaced Charlie Chaplin with Rambo, we replaced Raj Kapoor with Salman Khan. “What is interesting is that the loser has such little chance of becoming (even accidentally) a hero. It’s very much the age of worshipping success,” he says.

So, while it is possible for Saif Ali Khan to be a little confused about women in Salaam Namaste, Ranvir Sheorey in Ugly aur Pagli is only seen as contemptible. (Thanks to the DVD revolution, we have Jae-young Kwak’s My Sassy Girl playing at a pirate next door. Why should we want a pale imitation?) And if someone had asked the patriarch in an office the size of a football field, he would have told them: A hero cannot kill the parents of children and hope to win their love. It doesn’t work that way. Loser.

THE HEROINE

Too far Soha Ali Khan played with morals in Khoya Khoya Chand

FOR NEARLY EIGHT decades, the basic heroine remained unchanged. She was a virgin, in body and soul and mind; dutiful, beautiful and almost immobile in her virtue. The world was divided between the safe (the houses of her father and her husband) and the fraught (the wider world, the bhari duniya that the ablaa always feared).

And then she began to change.

Marginally.

It may have begun with Kunal Kohli’s near-unbearable Hum Tum. In this mess of humourless cartoons, there was one moment in which the old script was thrown out of the window. In a moment of passion, Rhea (Rani Mukherjee) and Karan (Saif Ali Khan) have sex. That they do this on a Mumbai beach, after a dip in the sea around South Mumbai, might suggest suicidal tendencies. But the next morning, when Rhea wakes up, she is not thinking of killing herself. She is not weeping copiously. That’s something of a first. Nor does she die at the end, as other women who transgress these sexual limits inevitably do.

One of the many couples who board the pink bus of honeymooners in Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd is a Bengali couple: the anally retentive Partho (Kay Kay Menon) and the dewy-eyed Milly (Raima Sen). In one hilarious sequence, she goes paragliding in a sari, which begins to unravel as Partho dances about on the beach below, horrified at this vastraharan. But when Milly lands, she chooses not to wrap herself in her sari, strutting away from him in her pretty blouse and petticoat. This marks a departure for her character, for the heroine in general, and for us as audience.

Look at Geet Dhillon (Kareena Kapoor) in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met. She is talkative, brassy, she meets life head on. When she meets Aditya Kashyap (Shahid Kapur), he is reticent while she babbles on. Finally, she leans in close and asks if he’s taken any “drugs-shugs”. Her tone is not outraged, she’s not drawing away in horror, she is merely curious and somewhat solicitious.

But, to many, these are the swallows that do not make a summer. “Even if the heroine has taken over the vamp’s role, she must have a certain innocence about her,” says Dr Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, “She cannot be aware of the effect she is having on men. That was what made Madhuri Dixit such a star. She had the innocent face and the direct smile that undercut anything she did.”

In that sense, the formula we will always have. The heroine may be independent, she may have a career, she may even be an object of some mystery to the hero, but she will always return to her roots once she falls in love. This is generally indicated by a shift of sartorial allegiance from west to east.

And while it is quite the done thing for a heroine to play a prostitute — there has been a long line of such women from Meena Kumari in Pakeezah to Sharmila Tagore in Mausam to Kareena Kapoor in Chameli — it’s quite another thing to play a woman of loose morals. Soha Ali Khan tried that in Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand and that went nowhere.

As the positive moral pole of the universe, the heroine cannot move too far from her position. She’s right, she’s always right, and the right-wing will keep her there.

THE FAMILY

The good stepson The 2003 family drama Baghban was a big hit

ONCE UPON A time there was a father, a mother and several sons. Always sons. This showed how efficient the family was at baby-making. They would sing a song as the mother did her tulsi puja and the boys did their boy thing and the father went to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

Bollywood took it seriously, this thing about the family being the building blocks of society. We knew a lot about characters simply from their names. Devdas? Brahmin. Vijay? Kshatriya.

Amitabh Bachchan punched through that. In Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar ka Sikandar, he has no name, he tells his Eternal Mother Nirupa Roy, because people only abuse him. She calls him Sikandar. She’s a Muslim, we know, because Sikandar takes her corpse to be buried — but we never know where his allegiance lies.

This cinematic moment is extended in Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela. Munna is not a name, it’s a nickname. Munna could be Hindu or Muslim or nothing at all. When we visit his house, he has no gods, only a picture of Schwarzenegger. In Satya, we meet Satya (Chakravarthy) stepping into Mumbai’s underworld. We know he must be Hindu, but he has no family. He never refers to his parents, his village, his origins. At last, we seemed to be cutting loose.

But a simultaneous development suggested that we weren’t done with the family. As a production house, the Rajshris spent decades promoting clean family dramas. They located action in either the extended family (Tapasya) or in the unit of two lovers (Taraana). The advent of the violent 1970s had left their films flopping, all that kept the company from bankruptcy was a small film called Nadiya Ke Paar which did more than a crore rupees business in Bihar.

It was this story that Sooraj Barjatya resurrected for Hum Aapke Hain Kaun..? The wildly successful film reminded Bollywood that there was no need for a villain, no need for a vamp. The old debate between duty and self could still be brought into play. That it was now set in a huge mansion and played out by young, westernised people, gave it a stronger charge. Baghban’s success set that in stone.

The family, we are always going to have with us.

THE CHILD

Off the walls Darsheel Safary touched hearts in Taare Zameen Par

KITAAB, THAT STRANGE 1977 experiment by Gulzar, relies almost entirely on the skills of Master Raju and Master Tito, and the most unimpressively picturised song of all time: Dhanno ki aankhon mein raat ka surma. Both children tried to put years of cutie-pie acting behind them but failed. The child was never a person, but a tool with which your heartstrings were tugged. To this end, they fell asleep crying, had rare diseases, made huge sacrifices — and simpered.

It was only in Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom that we came close to the level of Daisy Irani, or Master Rattan and Kumari Naaz in Raj Kapoor’s Boot Polish. (Time called it a gem of a film.)

Instructively, both Kitaab and Boot Polish offer depictions of poverty and suffering. In Kitaab, Babla (Master Raju) experiences coldness from the middleclass passengers on the train, but is welcomed by the beggars, and even shares the last traces of body warmth in a corpse. In Boot Polish, a bootlegger offers Belu and Bhola a chance at selfrespect, while finding herself in a rich home makes Belu very unhappy.

Perhaps the age of the normal child star is over. In Mani Ratnam’s Anjali, Baby Shamili was feted for her performance as the mentally challenged little girl, helped by some skilful lighting. When Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s dreadful Black was released, ‘critics’ went gaga over Ayesha Kapur’s young Michelle McNally. And then Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par brought us Darsheel Safary’s little boy with dyslexia and parents with dementia. (They never cotton on that he has learning disabilities? Sure.)

Notice something? If you’re going to have a child in the movies, you had better give it some kind of problem. Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise. Otherwise, you get the little tykes of Siddharth Anand’s Ta Ra Rum Pum, which tried to combine two genres in one uncomfortable film. Ever since Feroze Khan first strutted his stuff in the 1970s, the racing car has been a phallic symbol, suggesting sexual freedom and license. And here was Rajveer Singh (Saif Ali Khan), daddy to Princess and Champ, revving his engine rather hopelessly in the pit?

An odd and tangential idea. We need to call all the Iranian directors we can find to run workshops for Indian children. We could have Jafar Panahi, who handled the independent little kid in The Mirror; or Majid Majidi, who tore our hearts open with Children of Heaven; if we’re lucky, we could get Abbas Kiarostami, who got two superb performances from two young men: Babek Ahmed Poor in Where is the House of my Friend? and Amin Maher in Ten.

THE FRIENDS

A little help Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai broke the friendship mould

THE FILM THAT launched Harman Baweja, Love Story 2050, was set in the future, but quite a few of its elements seemed set in Bollywood’s distant past. The rich boy with no love in his life and a mother in the sky, with whom he holds conversations designed to wring your withers. Bratty kids who interrupt the lovemaking. Male friends who wander behind the hero, looking dopey and making the hero look more…well, more heroic.

We never saw the heroine’s friends as individuals. Once in a while, a special sakhi would read her letters and offer camp comments; but, in general, it was the girls’ hockey team, as in Teesri Manzil. The hero’s friend, however, served a special purpose. Before the multi-starrer, he was a comic who often announced his sexual immaturity with the clothes he wore: bright colours, short trousers, strange hats. His job was to provide contrast: where the hero was brave and dashing, the comic wanted to go home; the hero much in demand, the comic unwelcome; the hero oozing testosterone, his friend trailing slime.

In the late 1970s, budgets shot through the roof as multi-starrers seemed the only way to make money. Start with a Bachchan. Add a Kapoor, any Kapoor. Is there room for a Sinha or a Khanna? Script? What script? The new heroes spoke Bollywoodese, a strange argot by which men pledge eternal devotion to each other, to their mothers, to God and their native lands. Which is why Sai Paranjpe’s Chashme Buddoor was such a relief. Jai (Ravi Baswani) and Omi (Rakesh Bedi) have only one function in the life of their roomie Siddharth (Farooque Shaikh): to make him get a high-paying job so they can all live in the manner to which they’d like to get accustomed.

But that was seen as a middle-of-theroad movie, a new coinage for the egregious 1980s. Bollywood didn’t make that kind of film; outsiders did. Then Farhan Akhtar made Dil Chahta Hai. For the first time, young men talked like young men. They lived in houses that looked like the kind you might live in if you had lots of money, and a very chic interior designer. One scene merits attention: the moment when Akash (Aamir Khan) mocks Siddharth (Akshaye Khanna) for having a relationship with an older woman. It has all the rough edges of young men talking to each other.

This spawned a clutch of ensemble cast films, spreading bets over a bunch of smaller stars, casting Farhan Akhtar as a rock star and Purab Kohli, the reliable and ignored talent, as the friend.

But when Daddy makes a film for beta, you must bring on the 1970s caricature- friends because you don’t want competition to share his spotlight. So what if it doesn’t work?

THE MINORITY

Unity, diversity Saif Ali Khan encounters eccentric Parsis in Being Cyrus

ASCENE IN FEROZE Khan’s Qurbani sums up Bollywood’s attitude to Parsis. The hero encounters a Parsi couple in a vintage car. The man speaks in a high-pitched voice, the woman is seductive. What are we to take away? The man is impotent? The woman is unsatisfied? Both are nuts?

In KS Sethumadhavan’s Julie, the Anglo-Indian Roman Catholic Julie goes to her Hindu boyfriend’s house and says she loves coming over because their home smells of incense. Her own smells of alcohol, cigarettes, meat and a fourth odour made of the other three.

In my book, Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, I noted that the secularism of Bollywood arose out of commercial arithmetic. Muslims were a huge segment of the film-going audience so the Muslim was always a sympathetic figure: the basti’s Rahim chacha wanted everyone to come and eat sweets at his home over Eid. Parsis and Christians were seen as westernised, uninterested in Bollywood, so could be lampooned.

But, as in all things Bollywood, there are so many exceptions that the rule almost founders. The biggest is Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony, a film with a heart so large and a spirit so magnificent that it takes in everyone and laughs at everything, including its own pretensions. The titles roll on the blood of the three brothers surging into the veins of their mother. Each boy is asked his name. The first says, Amar. The second says, Akbar. The third says, Anthony and the blood rises from each young arm and joins into a single red stream and flows into the arm of the blind flowerseller, Nirupa Roy, to the tune of “Kya iski keemat chukaani nahin? Khoon khoon hota hai paani nahin”. Desai was told that blood donation didn't happen that way. He said he didn’t care how they did it in hospitals. He had a statement to make: we contribute to the body politic, Hindus, Muslims, Christians.

But for all this, the eldest brother is always Hindu and if ever there must be an intercaste marriage, the boy is always a Hindu. Hindus and Muslims do not marry onscreen, unless in an overt political statement (Mani Ratnam’s Bombay). But in the odd hierarchies that custom and power have established, a heroine could be Christian. Liz (Waheeda Rehman) in Baazi, Miss Edna (Madhubala) in Howrah Bridge, Bobby (Dimple) in Bobby, Jenny (Parveen Babi) in Amar Akbar Anthony and Annie (Manisha Koirala) in Khamoshi all marry their men without anyone saying, “She’s Isaai”.

How far have we come? When I was writing Helen, it struck me that one reason she may not have made the transition from dancer to heroine might have been her name. Today, we have quite a few Christian sounding names: John Abraham, Genelia D’Souza, Dino Morea, are three examples.

But the parodies continue. In Imtiaz Ali’s Socha Na Tha, Karen Fernandes's (Apoorva Jha’s) father (Sohrab Ardeshir) is a parody of the Bollywood Catholic. He speaks with an English accent, lives in a bungalow, drinks alcohol by the litre and sees it as a test of masculinity.

And as for Muslims... unfortunately, skip forward a bit to Villain.

THE POOR

Village voice Shreyas Talpade and Amrita Rao in Welcome to Sajjanpur

THE POOR OFTEN showed up in Hindi cinema. Not just the decorative poor, but real people of flesh and blood and dreams. KA Abbas and Raj Kapoor turned them into box office magic, giving us the little man with big dreams, who could pick up a dafli and sing, “Dil ka haal suneh dilwaala.”

Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, a faithful portrait of the landless poor, was a hit in Mumbai. Watching it today, you can see why the poor rickshaw puller that Bhisham Sahni mentions in his book Mere Bhai Balraj was so moved, why he kept saying to Balraj Sahni “This is my story, babu, this is my story.”

As lathis rain at Singur, as motorcycles roll into Nandigram, the farmers lose all over again. When Shambhu tells the landlord that land is the farmer’s mother, the landlord replies that industry is its father. The metaphor of penetration and conquest implicit in this patriarchal retort is evident, even today.

After Hum Aapke Hain Kaun...? it became a rule: everyone dresses well. Even extras must be colour-coordinated. The school-teacher's daughter wears designer saris. The poor we will always have with us, but must we tell their stories? The only time poverty enters the pictures today is in films like Pradeep Sarkar’s Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, but it is sorted out with a quick spot of high-class prostitution, as if there were no pimps in Mumbai to make sure prostitutes remain poor. Sarkar’s Parineeta had some poor people but they, like the family in LCMD, were land-rich upper-caste people.

The peasantry are reduced to colourful people, almost always in Rajasthani clothes, as in Apoorva Lakhia’s Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost. With the death of middle-of-the-road cinema, with Shyam Benegal going into what seemed like retirement, it seemed as if we weren’t going to notice our villages again.

But once again, all is not lost. The multiplex cinemas and DVD revolution have conspired to make possible films like Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi and Shyam Benegal’s robust comedy, Welcome to Sajjanpur.

Bollywood would do well to look at Marathi cinema. Nishikant Kamat’s Dombivli Fast was a powerful look at the man on the fourth seat of local trains. (These seats are built for three. The fourth man must adjust on a narrow strip of metal.) UV Kulkarni’s Valu and Mangesh Hadawale’s Tingya were both set in villages and had the charm of Sai Paranjpe’s films in the 1980s.

Hindi cinema should remember that it is the telling of stories that makes a national cinema. If it wants to retain its claim as the popular culture of India, it is going to have start thinking local even as it starts behaving global.

THE ALTERNATIVE

Going for brokeback Ashutosh Rana’s Shabnam Mausi was well played

THERE HAS ALWAYS been a camp element to Bollywood. “The stars were always flamboyant and as the male body became sexualised, it wasn’t just gay, it was also kinky. There was a strong element of sado-masochism in the leather trousers and the chaps and the like. Sometimes, I think the kinky was more important than the gay thing,” says Vikram Doctor, long-time observer of Bollywood and of gay trends.

Few people remember it but Bollywood’s first outing with gay trends was Prem Kapoor’s Badnaam Basti (1971). While not about homosexuality, it refered to two men in love and didn’t either demonise or caricature them.

Otherwise, the gay man turned up only to be mocked. In Sholay, he offers the ersatz Hitler of Indian jails (Asrani) a kiss. In Bobby Darling, Bollywood found his apotheosis: camp, shrill, of indeterminate gender. Ecce homo, said Bollywood with delight.

Things changed with films like Onir’s My Brother Nikhil and Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd (Although, even when situational lesbianism shows up in a film like Jabbar Patel’s Subah/ Umbartha, the heroine, herself struggling for selfhood, shows no sympathy.)

Dostaana is not a departure. Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham are only pretending to be gay, as all those heroes in drag weren’t actually women. The humour was derived from the pretence. At the end of Rafoo Chakkar, for instance, Paintal confesses to his admirer that he is a man. The admirer is not discouraged. “Nobody’s perfect,” he says.

It may be a while before we make our Brokeback Mountain, but the viciousness of Bollywood’s homophobia has changed into an almost affectionate spoofing.

And there is some recognition that the homosexual and the hijra are distinct identities. The hijra has always had a marginal position in society, duly reflected in cinema. For years, the hijra song from Mehmood’s Kunwara Baap was sung in school-buses heading off for picnics. Yet, beneath superstitions about powers granted to the third sex, there has always been a fear of castration. In the 1980s, Mahesh Bhatt played on this fear in Sadak, although he had a more sympathetic portrait of a hijra in Tamanna. Such spaces opened up more with films like Amol Palekar’s Daayra or Yogesh Bhardwaj’s Shabnam Mausi. In the latter, although Ashutosh Rana’s is a sustained performance as the first transgender person to win an election to the Madhya Pradesh State Legislature, Vijay Raaz as his ‘mother’ Halima, turns in a brilliant cameo.

The boundaries are shifting at the speed of an iceberg, but there’s been some movement.

THE VILLAIN

All the bad guys Naseeruddin Shah in A Wednesday

BOLLYWOOD HAS NEVER really had to worry about shades of grey. There are shades of grey in every role. Ask any actor asked why s/he agreed to play a role. “Well,” says the actor, putting on the kind of expression he assumes John Malkovich might use on Inside the Actors’ Studio, “I wanted to play Tia because there are interesting shades of grey to her character. She may be a poor girl in love with a rich boy, but she isn’t the standard poor girl in love with a rich boy.” No, she isn’t. That kind of poor girl has acid thrown in her face by the rich boy’s family.

Any actor playing a villain will tell you he’s doing it because the character has shades of grey. These shades are generally to be found in his beard. And he will wear a beard because, have you noticed? The villains are now all terrorists and the terrorists are all Muslim.

This makes it easy to tap into a way of thinking being encouraged by the mainstream media, who show only images of Muslims en masse at prayer; by the police, who buy Muslim-looking headgear for those arrested; and by right-wing political parties, who want to make capital. It also allows Bollywood to claim that it is reflecting current situations; telling us stories of today.

Will Bollywood choose to make a film on the attacks on Christian churches? Unlikely. Will it make a film on what happened at Khairlanji or what happened at Nandigram? Unlikely. But the extreme edge of violence and uncertainty that terrorism brings to our life has been deemed sexy, so we have had any number of films using terror as the backdrop. Where the villain was once motivated by simple desires — greed, lust — he is now an ideologue.

What’s new, you might ask. We’ve had terrorism films since Mani Ratnam began his terror trilogy with Roja in 1992. The difference is that Ratnam went beyond the easy patriotism of Roja to attempt understanding the interior world of the terrorist in Dil Se. Santosh involving the ultimate sacrifice. It seems we must believe that the Muslim not only hates everyone else in the country, but hates successful Muslims too. The first scenes of Mani Shankar’s Mukhbiir juxtapose a terrorist, with a portrait of the Ka’aba behind him, and the hero, praying in a white dhoti to an image of the Mother Goddess under a waterfall.

It has been a long time since we could believe a director as we believe Anurag Kashyap, who writes about Black Friday in his blog, passionforcinema. com, “I don’t take sides because there are no sides... the only side I am on is ‘This will continue if we don’t learn to forgive’. When you take sides you only see one POV, and that misleads.”

THE COMIC

Last comic standing Paresh Rawal reprises a role in Phir Hera Pheri

DON’T LOOK NOW, but the funeral of the comic is passing. Send up a raspberry for the likes of Johnny Walker, Mehmood, Kishore Kumar, Keshto Mukherjee and even Johnny Lever. Requiescat in pace.

Humour, we have always had with us. We have made some very funny films: Jyoti Swaroop’s Padosan and Ketan Mehta’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro are at either ends of the scale, between the lighthearted comedy and the social satire. Sai Paranjpe made a couple of delightful films at which we could all laugh.

Then David Dhawan took over. He was assisted by the enormous talent of Govinda as a comic actor: flawless timing, a mobile face, an ordinary body blessed with a rhythm from the gods themselves. That often kept things from going too bad — in the bawdiest of Govinda’s moves, there was a suggestion of effrontery, of not quite believing in all this. And an effortless undercurrent of subversiveness: the MTV generation was being sent up, big time, by the smalltown boy in lemon yellow trousers.

Somewhere along the line, we devalued the comic so much that we threw out the baby with the bathwater. Blame Priyadarshan; his comedy rests on the assumption that an actor who comes cheap can be a comic. Thus, he will put together a bunch of young men and assume that if they are all looking to woo the same woman, it will work. It doesn’t.

In Hera Pheri, Priyadarshan’s first comic outing, we made two astonishing discoveries: Akshay Kumar could act and he could be funny, even if he had a pretty awful voice. But even he could do nothing in the face of Paresh Rawal’s sheer comic firepower. So figure this out: what was Suniel Shetty doing in the film?

Hindi cinema has never been kind to its comics. They don’t get top billing. They don’t get awards. So, if a Bollywood hero can do comedy, he tries to conceal it. Amitabh Bachchan was a very good comic, but he spent most of his life lashing out with his fists. Dharmendra was funny, but he had that Punjabi body and that face, so he became an action hero who couldn’t do anger without sounding out of breath. Arshad Warsi is way funnier than Sanjay Dutt in both Munnabhais, he’s the better actor, but who gets the credit? The man with the muscles. What happened to comedy?

What happened to the rest of cinema? The writers are disappearing. In the old dispensation, the writer was an integral part of the team.

Take KA Abbas from Raj Kapoor and you get Ram Teri Ganga Maili. Take Abrar Alvi away from Guru Dutt… but that didn’t happen. Guru Dutt left early. Today, everyone’s working on a script but the power is still in the prodooser’s paws. He will ask for an item number. He will ask for a big-name hero. And then he’ll say, “Chalo yaar, let’s make another Bheja Fry.”

As if you can allow the money to drown out talent and expect to make intelligent cinema.

And so we get the writers we deserve. Right now, the writing has gone into the toilet so everyone asks everyone else in a Bollywood comedy:

“Jaana hai kya?”

Actually, yes.