1977 was an unremarkable year for film. Admittedly it was
the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters when Hollywood was
beginning to cotton on to the power of the Blockbuster but otherwise there is
little to get excited about. The era of the great American political movies was
drawing to an end though auteurs like Scorsese (New York, New York), Lynch (Eraserhead)
and Scott (The Duelists) were
emerging.
Some great enduring films were still made: Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire; Ray’s The Chess Players, Allen’s Annie Hall and Herzog’s Stroszek are all classics but this was
clearly a year of transformation and change.
But has that got anything to do with Parvarish, one of the great Amitabh Bachchan masalas?
Nothing whatsoever!
Indeed if I had to compare it with anything else made in
1977 it would have to be with The Spy
Who Loved me, an absurd Bond by any standards; but even that would be doing
Parvarish a huge disservice. If I’ve
learned anything these past months it’s that you just can’t judge Bollywood
films by Hollywood (or European) standards.
Made in the same few years as Zanjeer (1973), Sholay
and Deewar (1975), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Don (1978) and Naseeb (1981), Parvarish
is, like all of those great films, an entertainment first and foremost.
Inspector Shamsher Singh (Shammi Kapoor) has encircled the
bandit Mangal Singh (Amjad Khan) at his home just as his wife gives birth to a
son, Amit. Some of the gang, included his brother, escape but Singh is
captured. The dying wife gives up their son to the care of the inspector who
takes him home to be cared for along with his own son Kishan.
Eight years pass and we learn that Kishan is becoming the
naughty one whilst Amit is well behaved. Mangal Singh is released from jail and
comes to reclaim his son. The Inspector refuses but Kishan accidentally comes
to believe that he is the son of the bandit.
Jump ahead again and Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) is a police
inspector himself whilst Kishan (Vinod Khanna), seemingly a teacher in a school
for the blind, is actually central to Mangal Singh’s criminal gang. Now the
film really begins.
Actually this is all familiar stuff – children separated
from parents; mistaken identity; one brother a cop and the other a criminal -
national duty v familial duty; nature v nurture; criminality and corruption as
the reason for society’s inequities (though the police come out remarkably well
in this one). So what makes it better than many other films of its type and
era?
Bachchan and Khanna are at the top of their game as great
action heroes but are funny and charismatic too, and the action (apart from the
hilarious submarines) is, for a 70s masala, fairly slick; as is the editing.
What elevates the film (into Seeta aur
Geeta territory) is Neetu Singh and Shabana Azmi as sisters Neeto and
Shabbo. They are skilled thieves and pick pockets, who become mixed up in the
lives of Amit and Kishan. Ostensibly the ‘love interest’ they get the best
lines, the best songs and easily steal the show. Indeed, the film loses some of
its allure in the second half when they get less screen time and thus less of
their exuberant charm and personality.
Here lies one of the most interesting issues in Bollywood
film. We know that the male stars drive the industry and get paid far more than
the female stars (5 to 10 times more usually) and that they are lionised in
Indian society. We also know that, just like any other popular romantic cinema
throughout its history, Hindi movies rest, rely and thrive on the magnetism and
sex appeal of their female stars as well as that insubstantial mysterious
quality, desire. Yet reading reviews,
gossip columns and blogs it’s almost as though this obvious reality is hidden
or blurred - that Indian society (?) can’t admit to the centrality of women and
that the best films undoubtedly have the more interesting female characters.
Of course sensuality and eroticism are as central to cinema
as light and shade. Even when the camera hasn’t objectified and gazed longingly
at the female form (and the male form), desire lurks everywhere in the history
of film. Desire, conceptually insubstantial as it is, IS different from
objectification of women in films and from the sexism prevalent throughout the
film industry. Texts are both about desire AND generate desire in the viewer,
and though this can arguably said of all texts – literature (Deleuze and
Guattari’s famously called literary texts “machines of desire”), art, music,
theatre – cinematic texts are especially complicated in this regard. Lacan’s
identification of the “ ’paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even
scandalous character’ of desire” gives one a sense of that complexity.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to separate out desire from
sexual objectification – not at all - so to begin with I’ll concentrate on the
more tangible aspects of sexism and objectification. Recent studies
show the remarkable inequality in Hollywood films. Exact facts and figures are
harder to find for Bollywood but all the evidence points to even worse
statistics. Women have fewer roles, less screen time; they are more likely represent
sexist stereotypes and so on. The movie business echoes and perpetuates the
structural sexism throughout Western society. This is unequivocally the same in
Bollywood. Objectification and the male gaze is a different aspect of this
sexism and you only have to watch a couple of recent item numbers to realise
that sexual objectification of women is a key part of contemporary Hindi films.
Studies based on qualitative content analysis back up that impression.
A few critics have
raised a different question. Does Indian cinema require a more flexible,
nuanced critical framework from the seminal work done in feminist film
criticism by Laura Mulvey and her successors? They did after all base their
work on Hollywood films. In Hollywood the male gaze and the objectified
representation of women can be astoundingly obvious and gratuitous (Transformers) or slightly less so (Leaving Las Vegas) but often we are so
inured to it that it is only those more obvious ones we pick out for criticism.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t still much more prevalent than cinephiles would
perhaps like to admit. Common sense (and my impression after watching 70
Bollywood films) would suggest Bollywood is no different – and probably worse.
Nonetheless those dissenting critics ask if there is perhaps a different
‘Indian culture of looking’ that is not, still, mainly concerned with
objectifying women. It’s a more
reasonable and interesting question than one might imagine. Western cinema, has
throughout its history, been based on realism and thus there is a voyeuristic
element to watching other people’s ‘real’ lives play out. Indian cinema is melodramatic
in form and thus far more concerned with performance. The ludicrous fight
sequences, the breaks in continuity and the song and dance numbers make it
clear that the movie you are watching is not realistic in the same way The Godfather is. Could this really make
a difference to the dynamics of gaze and the interpretation of images?
Anyway, going back to Parvarish
for a minute, it’s completely unsurprising that virtually all Hindi films,
unlike Hollywood movies, rely on their (young) female stars. Indian audiences
expect a bit of everything in their films–there has to be elements of romance
or family drama even in an action film just as there has to be music. Whereas
there are MANY great popular Western films that hardly feature women at all – The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Cool Hand
Luke, The Great Escape, The Seven
Samurai, The Wild Bunch. So many indeed that we have to complain about a
lack of interesting female roles again and again.
This makes life very interesting for any analysis of women’s
role in Indian films. You might imagine a fairly simple dichotomy between films
that offer up sexist stereotypes or glamorised pin-ups and those that offer more
interesting female characters – or at least a clearly delineated spectrum. Another
theory might suggest that all women’s roles are corrupted by the oppressive
sexual politics and chauvinistic attitudes prevalent throughout Indian society.
Neither alternative seems correct however. I
wonder instead if there’s something unique to the masala mix that changes the
equation in a more fundamental way. This isn’t to suggest that most Hindi films
don’t incorporate various varieties of sexism and crude stereotype, or that
they don’t objectify women - they do. This
is tricky territory as I don’t want to fall in to any form of Orientalism. Nonetheless
It’s one thing to embrace the differences between Bollywood and Hollywood and
the differences in audience expectation and quite another to feel like I’m
excusing sexism in Hindi films in any way. Thus my feeling is that Hindi films
don’t require a more sophisticated critical framework for analysing the male gaze
– but I’m going to do some more reading and get back to you. Rather I wonder if
Hindi films do something unique with sensuality and with desire - though I’m perfectly
willing to accept, for now anyway, that has more to do with my new found
fascination for Bollywood.
