PRO-HINDI & PRO-BOLLYWOOD PROPAGANDA / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

IT’S NOT JUST BOLLYWOOD, STUPID!

Language propagandists or a lazy media? Who floated the myth that the Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood is India’s only — or largest — film industry?

By Anna MM Vetticad

“Aapki yeh karambhoomi Bambai hai. Aapka Kurukshetra ka maidan Mumbai hai (Bombay is the land where you will work, Mumbai is your battlefield),” he declared to listening students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. The speaker was actor Mukesh Khanna. The comment came during a recent panel discussion on NDTV India about Gajendra Chauhan’s selection as FTII chairperson.

Why did Khanna assume that the students’ karambhoomi would be Mumbai? Did he not think these youngsters would, could or should work in any of the other dozen-plus Indian language cinemas emerging from centres located across the country?


Khanna — current chief of the Children’s Film Society India — sidestepped my annoyance as a fellow panelist. Not surprising. As he struggled during the show to name Dadasaheb Phalke Award-winning Malayalam director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, calling him “Gopal Adoor” instead, it became clear that he knows and/or cares little about Indian cinema beyond the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry aka Bollywood.

He is not a solitary example.

Indian cinema is not just Bollywood. Try telling that though to the vast sections of the public — especially, though not only, those from northern India — and the supposedly ‘national’ media headquartered in Delhi and Mumbai who casually use the terms “Indian cinema” and “Hindi cinema” / “Bollywood” interchangeably. Sometimes they at least acknowledge the existence of what is patronisingly termed “regional cinema”; sometimes not even that. Sadly, the rest of the world is picking up this vocabulary.

So what has led to the common misconception that Bollywood is India’s only — or largest — film industry? The answer lies in a near-invincible cocktail of political propaganda, parochialism, historical happenstance, media laziness and marketing.

India’s three largest film industries — Hindi, Tamil and Telugu — have rivalled each other since the days of the earliest talking films. According to Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen’s Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, the first talkie in each of these languages — Alam Ara (Hindi-Urdu), Kalidas (Tamil) and Bhakta Prahlada (Telugu) — were all made in 1931.

In other areas too, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu run neck and neck. Annual reports of the Central Board of Film Certification show that 206 Hindi features were certified in 2011, followed closely by Telugu with 192 and Tamil at 185. The previous year’s figures: Hindi – 215, Tamil – 202, Telugu – 181. The costliest Indian film till date is reportedly Bahubali from the Telugu film industry a.k.a. Tollywood. As per media speculation, Tamil film legend Rajinikanth is India’s highest paid actor.

Hindi’s distinct advantage over the other two is in terms of reach since the language is spoken in more states than Telugu and Tamil. Now combine Bollywood’s laudable marketing efforts here and abroad with the underhand success of Hindi language propagandists who have learnt well from this theory attributed to Hitler’s minister Joseph Goebbels: A lie repeated a million times becomes the truth. Their efforts have entrenched another myth in Indian public consciousness: the myth that Hindi is the national language, when in fact India has no constitutionally designated national language.

It’s a vicious circle. English
 newspapers and TV channels headquartered in India’s political capital New Delhi and com
mercial capital Mumbai are
 physically closer to Bollywood than to the Tamil and Telugu industries based in Chennai and Hyderabad respectively. As is the norm with all lazy journalism, what is closer is given more importance.

Besides, most of these media houses have north Indian owners and/or editors who tend to see north Indian culture as the Indian norm while traditions of other regions are deemed exceptions. Most, therefore, hire critics to review Bollywood and Hollywood films, invest resources in extensive Bollywood reportage, and treat Telugu and Tamil as asides to be occasionally acknowledged for exotica (example: visuals of fans bathing Rajinikanth’s cut-outs in milk) or when that rare, heavily promoted, tentpole project comes around (example: Bahubali). Smaller industries are treated as intellectual footnotes (example: Satyajit Ray).

Nothing exemplifies this bias better than the coverage of the National Film Awards by English TV channels. In what is now an annual ritual, every tiny award to a Hindi film or star is headlined, while major awards such as Best Film are downplayed if they don’t go to Bollywood. The more the ‘national’ press ignores industries other than Bollywood, the more they help increase Bollywood’s market while also furthering the impression that it is — we come back to that — India’s only film industry or the largest one.

And so we have the bizarre phenomenon of an entity that calls itself the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) appropriating the term “Indian film” to hold a travelling annual awards function for Hindi films. Equally bizarre was then Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s faux pas in 2012 while addressing the audience at the Cinefan film festival in her city: Indian cinema had completed a century that year, but Dikshit chose to term it “100 years of Bollywood”. Last year, Amitabh Bachchan delivered a 25-minute speech purportedly about “Indian cinema” at the International Film Festival of India in Goa. Out of the scores and scores of films and personalities he cited though, only four were not from Bollywood.

As the Central government prepares to celebrate Hindi Week in September, it is worth asking: if your karambhoomi is not Mumbai’s Hindi cinema, does it not count?

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on August 22, 2015)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/its-not-just-bollywood-stupid/article7561938.ece 

Photograph courtesy: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathanayakudu_(2008_film)

Note: This photograph was not sourced from The Hindu Businessline 

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “The Rape of Avanthika”

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2015/07/romanticising-rape-film-fatale-column.html

REVIEW 343: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION

Release date:	August 7, 2015
Director:	Christopher McQuarrie
Cast: Language:	Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, Sean Harris English

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (a.k.a. MI5) is fun while it lasts, features a couple of breath-stopping stunts, but 24 hours since I saw it, it is also already fading from my mind.

When the best bits of a film are announced in a three-minute trailer, and the film itself adds little else to its content, you know there’s a problem.

When a film fails to expand on the thrills and plot elements of previous instalments in a high-adrenaline series, you know there’s a problem.

So yeah, it’s fun ‘n’ forgettable but for one department: the name’s Ferguson, Rebecca Ferguson.

The MI series is a boys’ club. I mean, there’s always one ultra-glam feisty woman around, but she is always replaced in the next film by another such woman joining a boy gang headlined by the sprightly, gutsy maverick US spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF). MI5 is different from the rest in some senses yet emphasises its intrinsic nature in the end.

You see, director Christopher McQuarrie has given the largest portion of the stunts to (enemy?) agent Ilsa Faust, played by the lovely, agile, Ingrid Bergman lookalike Rebecca. She gets to bring down her boss’ flunkey by ascending his gigantic body in a split second and to lead a show-stopping motorcycle marathon which ends in a spectacularly anti-climactic fashion.

You get the picture? Ilsa/Rebecca is amazing, does more stunts in MI5 than any of the men and doesn’t get involved in a silly romance with Ethan. Her return in MI6 though is a question mark, while we are pretty much assured that Ethan’s four male supporters will be back – perhaps to reassure MI’s fans and lead star who may find her dominance here disconcerting, and certainly because most Hollywood action franchises shed female characters more routinely than trees shed autumn leaves (I mean, for heaven’s sake, MI5 doesn’t even bother to mention Ethan’s wife).

Well, my glass is half full here. It’s sad to see the insecurity surrounding Rebecca, but it’s fantastic to see the director pointedly setting her up to outshine her male co-stars.

The ‘story’: Ethan is convinced of the existence of a Syndicate, a shadow organisation of spies formerly employed by the world’s premier intelligence agencies. That’s the “rogue nation” of the title. Since the CIA does not buy his theory, our hero must go rogue himself to save the world.

Along the way we are served some standard MI tropes such as self-destructing recorded messages, loaded sunglasses, unbelievably believable masks and trans-continental journeys, none of them tired from over-use. There is the usual audacity too, with potential targets including the world’s most important political leaders. There is also a marvellously paced underwater stunt.

The dialogue writing is a mixed bag, with a rather neat and relevant “There are no allies in statecraft, only common interests” (uttered by the British intelligence chief) thankfully making up for the laughable “Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny” (by his US counterpart).

At the end of it all though, nothing in the story or action made me sit up and say: this is not something I have ever seen or imagined before in MIs or elsewhere. There is certainly nothing here to equal Ethan scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, as he did in the last MI film, Ghost Protocol.

For the record, Tom is cute and incredibly lithe at 53, though it is clear he has been given less running about to do this time. Rebecca is tasked with most of the sweat-inducing work, which of course means Ethan Hunt’s signature sprint is barely seen here. Still, it’s nice as always to see this charismatic star so involved in a role that defies believability. Age sits well on his face and body. If one overhead shot of a weirdly chalk-like bare torso does him no justice, there is another to compensate for it: when he heaves himself off a pole while handcuffed to it.

Of the rest, returning stars Jeremy Renner as senior IMF agent William Brandt and Ving Rhames as IMF ex Luther Stickell are both convincing. Simon Pegg as Ethan’s buddy and colleague Benji Dunn is even more so with the add-on of being charming. Sean Harris is interesting as the villain. Alec Baldwin as the slightly dense CIA director Alan Hunley is, well, Alec Baldwin.

The only sore thumb of the lot is the usually dependable Tom Hollander who was so good as the obnoxious Mr Collins in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, but looks slightly incongruous as the British PM here. Still, the scene involving him is one of the reasons why I continue to watch this series: because it does not take itself too seriously and is willing to poke fun at its own silliness.

That’s MI Rogue Nation for you – suspenseful, amusing and thrilling in parts, yet insubstantial and unmemorable but for Rebecca. The series is now resting on its laurels. Buck up, MI people.   

Rating (out of five): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	133 minutes PG-13 (for sequences of action and violence, and brief partial nudity)
Release date in US:	July 31, 2015

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_–_Rogue_Nation

TRIVIALISING SEXUAL VIOLENCE / COLUMN PUBLISHED ON BBC HINDI

(The Hindi translation of this article was published on bbc.com/hindi/ on July 25, 2015. It was written as a follow-up to the right-wing reaction to “The Rape of Avanthika”, my column that appeared in The Hindu Businessline on July 18, 2015)

By Anna MM Vetticad

“It’s not rape, it’s seduction, b**ch!”

“Ignore her Her name says she’s from Vatican city and She might have got money from church to write this column.” (sic)

This is a tiny – relatively polite – sample of the venom being spewed on my social media accounts since the appearance of my column, “The Rape of Avanthika”, in The Hindu Businessline last Saturday.

By the time the column was published, the Telugu blockbuster Bahubali – simultaneously shot in Tamil and released in multiple dubbed versions – was already a certified hit. Fans of the film, you would imagine, had no reason to be insecure.

Still, I expected a standard misogynistic backlash since I had written about the trivialisation of sexual violence in Indian cinema. The immediate provocation was an extended ‘seduction’ sequence in Bahubali, in which the hero repeatedly violates the body of the female warrior Avanthika, then – through music and dance – roughs her up, strips off part of her outfit, alters the rest of her attire and her face despite her resistance. Within seconds, she falls for him and falls asleep in his arms.

This song-and-dance metaphor for rape insidiously perpetuates a prevalent notion that the way to a woman’s heart is through force. I knew from experience that I would receive sexist vitriol for my critique. What I did not realise was that hordes of viewers have been counting Bahubali as a “Hindu success” and a matter of “south Indian/Telugu pride”.

And so, vile comments have been pouring in for a week now, from film fans and from the Hindu Right who see Bahubali – steeped as it is in Hindu mythology – as a “Hindu answer” to the “Muslim PK”. “Muslim” because of the lead actor Aamir Khan’s religion and “answer” because they saw PK’s indictment of religion per se as a Hindu-bashing exercise.

Be that as it may, Indian films have trivialised violence against women for decades. Readers of this website would be familiar with the phenomenon in Bollywood in particular. Just this year, in director Aanand L. Rai’s Tanu Weds Manu Returns, the character Pappi abducts a woman from her wedding because, despite her denials, he believes she loves him. Pappi is portrayed as loveable, his actions as a joke.

From stalking to molestation and other forms of assault, our heroes are doing it all under the guise of courtship. In Rai’s 2013 film Raanjhanaa, the hero is a pest who slashes his wrists twice and even drives the heroine into a river on a scooter in anger. In Holiday (2014), Virat Bakshi (Akshay Kumar) stalks Saiba (Sonakshi Sinha) and forcibly kisses her. In Kick (2014), Salman Khan lifts Jacqueline Fernandez’s skirt with his teeth, surrounded by a group of male dancers.

Violence, you see, is cute and amusing in Bollywood’s book. Even a seemingly enlightened director like Imtiaz Ali has featured rape jokes in both Jab We Met (2007) and Rockstar (2011).

The cliched response to such criticism is that films portray India’s reality. My experience this week tells you that fans don’t like those who raise their voices against a glorification or comedification of this terrible reality. The thing about breaking the silence though is that whenever you do, you discover multitudes who share your opinion but were feeling lonely with their views since no one around them had spoken up. Far greater than the flood of Bahubali-loving trolls abusing me this week is the deluge from men and women saying: “Thank goodness you wrote this. I thought I’m the only one feeling this way.” You are not. I am not. And we both ought to speak up.

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

BBC Hindi link: http://www.bbc.com/hindi/entertainment/2015/07/150723_mysogyny_india_films_bahubali_women_rns

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/bahubali.the.movie

Note: This photograph was not sourced from BBC Hindi