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Some questions about microfinance and self-help groups
The editorial examines how self-help groups and microfinance may not be what they were once intended to be - the silver bullet to eliminate poverty - and this could soon become a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
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Responses to the Editorial in Phalanx 4
Why Does the Anglophone Indian want to be a Novelist?
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Films: |
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Avatar
by James Cameron
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3 Idiots
by Rajkumar Hirani Read |
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Home > Contents > Essay: Ratnakar Tripathy |
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Om Shanti Om
Enchantment, Parody, Self-reflexivity
Ratnakar Tripathy
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Introductory remarks
I would justify the selection of Om Shanti Om [OSO]' for interpretative analysis by claiming it to be one of the most daring and radical critiques of Bollywood cinema, as well as its most unashamed and unequivocal vindication in recent times. The startling thing here is that such an inseparable medley of both critique and blatant adoration has come from within Bollywood itself. Hindi cinema has had on occasions reflected on itself with fulsome dedication in films like 'Kagaz Ke Phool', 'Mera Naam Joker' and more recently 'Taal' before a Bombay bred choreographer Farah Khan decided to give us her own wholesale take on the 'Mahabharata called Bollywood' in OSO. The point here is not simply to gauge or assess the self-consciousness shown by a genre or a specific work but also to examine how it incorporates this self-consciousness in its narrative flow and whether its self-consciousness enables it to transform and transcend itself.
There have been in the past any number of films with patchy or passing references to the medium itself, and the elusive epithet 'filmy' has curiously emerged from the trade as one of those indispensable and yet ineffably polyvalent concepts. We keep rediscovering this slippery notion not simply in cinema halls but in the midst of everyday wide awake usage, even though being asked to precisely put your finger on it may seem to spell trouble. This term probably seeks to emphasize a certain genre specific stance and style shared by the eyes looking at the screen as well as the spectacle on the screen. Having survived several decades of critical neglect and despise, Hindi cinema now seems to speak in far bolder tones about its 'filminess' than before. Ironically, this has become possible at a point in time when Hindi cinema may be going through a sea change both in terms of its content and the technology, promising to become rather unrecognizable perhaps in the next decade or so. Even as I say this, I can sense Minerva's owl make a timely traverse across the year 2008. This is broadly the historical backdrop for this article.
There is however also a theoretical context, which requires to be made explicit at the outset. First, I have to admit that the moment I find a genre, any genre, be it a self-referent village Nautanki in Bihar or an elegant Eight and a Half by Fellini, that seems to reflect on its own being, my heart warms up and I lose my sense of proportion, both in terms of my distance from a given show and my urge to apply ruthless tools of analysis to it. Part of this oblivion and security may arise from the fact that when a certain self-reflexivity is already in evidence, I don't need to start from scratch as a critic. I feel secure in the realization that someone seems to be producing a cultural object not in the frenzied assembly line mode of manufacturing plastic buckets, and that there is a critical eye present on the stage or the screen, to begin with. Call it quality control if you like, but I prefer to call it self-respect or a natural and nurturing fondness for the given medium by its faithful members in all possible epochs and eras.
 Another reason I delay or douse my critical responses almost perversely is that I wish to continue to enjoy, indeed enhance my enjoyment of spectacle and not turn into a critical-analytical food processor incapable of tasting its own morsels. I have no desire to turn into a critic-analyst who has risen above the petty matters of pleasure and pain into a state of numbed objectivity. I thus applaud the filmmaker for the unrestrained fun OSO brought me. And yet, lest fun and enjoyment begin to sound like porcine wallowing, I would like to rise above the muddy splashes of joy to make a more enduring and explicit sense of the film.
The second theoretical issue is related to my own methodological ambivalences in analyzing popular culture over the years. On the one hand, there were finely shaded theories of ideology and hegemony which tried to forcefit the elements of popular culture into a number of allegedly conforming moulds such as heterosexuality, family, patriarchy, community, caste, class and the nation state, not necessarily in that order. At times they seemed unfairly procrustean and reductionist, but at times they led to deep insights, a very mixed bag of results indeed! But even within the embrace of such approach, there is a need to distinguish between a tendency to see pervasive and immanent ideological hegemony in popular art, and one that claims to see the opposite everywhere it looks - rebellion and dissent through and through. A bit like the well-known gestalt illustration, the same figure can cause you to see an hourglass at one moment and human faces at the other, hopefully not both at the same time in a schizoid montage.
On the other hand, there are approaches that may be broadly described as psychoanalytic/psychological which see in popular culture a patient's unrestrained outpourings as he lies on the analyst's couch. In its worst moments, such approach seemed to equate the entirety of popular culture with the fantasies and anxieties of wholesale confessions made to a psychiatric counselor (1). In its best moments of course, it led to insights unavailable elsewhere, especially when supported by other sources such as myths, fairy tales and literature. This is no place to try to resolve a fundamental theoretical issue but I must admit that over time I have often been disloyal to both these approaches in all their grandeur. The reason is I now try to ensure that my deeper loyalty to empirical reality remains uncompromised, in order to as they gallantly say, 'save the phenomenon'. This makes me a theoretical opportunist with no sense of ontological commitment, and I must admit right away that I feel no shame in committing this grave philosophical sin. I suppose, in my incessant chase after a phantom, I only need to keep the quarry in sight without having to consult a compass to indicate direction. Settling the issue of the nature of reality or even the visual image with finality before beginning to figure out OSO doesn't seem a prudent or pragmatic idea anyway.
Retelling the story of Bollywood by Bollywood
To get down to the main business of analyzing Om Shanti Om, here is my own retelling of the film. The film comes in two parts - in the first part, you start with a male protagonist who happens to be a second generation junior artist, the very dregs of the film industry in caste terms, if you like. He lives with what he calls a 'filmy' mother and spends a lot of time mouthing stale movie dialogues at home and among friends. His entire existence seems like a grandiosely miserable kitsch on 70 mm. But he is blessed with a singularly hyperactive imagination. He not only dreams of turning a superstar but goes and falls in love with none less than the reigning movie star of the day called Shanti. He stands in front of her hoardings, confessing his love in his gushy filmy language. And yet significantly, he is not a neurotic stalker. In fact he is self-conscious enough to break his confessional monologue in front of a gigantic hoarding of his dream girl by asking her - 'kahin tum bore to nahin ho rahee ho.[I hope you are not getting bored]' - the very anxiety of a true blood entertainer.
 Soon, the pathetic junior artist begins to rise from a state of disdained insecthood to levels deserving the compassion, if not the empathy of the audience. And then he makes a sudden and spontaneous leap to hero-hood when he jumps into a blazing movie set to rescue Shanti, not unlike the legendary real life scene between Sunil Dutt and Nargis on the sets of 'Mother India'. The life motto of this aspiring hero is very simple - 'they say, if you really wish for something sufficiently strongly, the whole world gets together to ensure that you get it'. Never heard of any such faux proverb or quote before I saw OSO! This mantra anyway has nothing to do with the fiery motivational formulas spouted by a Deepak Chopra or an Abdul Kalam. It quite likely means that in order to fulfill your dreams all you need to do is to switch off reality, shut your eyes and put on your own 'my favourite fantasies' channel. And your resourceful neurons will provide a much better picture quality than the latest lasers! My guess is, the filmmaker's injunction here is - 'don't despise your daydreams. Just drag some of them into your daylight life and see what happens!'
As against this, the glamorous Shanti's life seems steeped in the utterly sordid despite her starry status. Secretly married to a film producer, the villain of the piece, she is faced with both pregnancy and rejection by him. The hero Om happens on the scene of their final confrontation and ends up makings another heroic but unsuccessful intervention, trying to foil the villain's attempt to murder Shanti. In the process, both the hero and the heroine get swallowed by the huge pyres created by the villain and die. The chapter of pure unmixed desiring thus ends up unfulfilled, which is why the need for propitiation of perturbed spirits and the title 'Om Shanti Om'!
Before we move on to the next half of the story, let us make due note of the fact that the villain here is a film producer or more appropriately a financial wheeler-dealer and a behind the scenes man - the key authority figure in the Bollywood industry. As we shall see later, the villain soon shifts to Hollywood after the crime and starts producing films for the NRI audience - perhaps Farah Khan's personal revenge against the breed. Another self-deprecatory slogan recurrently used by the director in the film is 'happy endings', indicating how the story teller of Bombay cinema has to hover above the common miseries of life such as boredom, disease and death, and invariably conclude a tale with happy endings. Tragic incidents thus may play the rhetorical role of assuring an audience that the storyteller's job is not over yet and one must wait for the undoing of the tragedy. As the protagonist teasingly reminds the audience - 'Picture abhi baki hai [the movie hasn't ended yet!]'.
 In the second half, we move from the early 1980s [the period of Hollywood's The Reincarnation of Peter Proud [1975] and Bollywood's Karz [1980] to the present. Now Om reborn is seen as the only child of a superstar from yesteryears. The second generation film hero in his new birth slowly realizes that he is just a lowly Om in another birth - a miserable junior artist reincarnated into a star - verily, a junior artist's dream come true. The one visible link between the two births seems to be the occasional pyrophobic attacks, the only chink in the armoured self of a new Om. This episodic neurosis however slowly culminates in a blast of memories from the past birth. But before all that happens, we see him attain all the tinselly dreams of wealth a junior artist may nurse. These dreams include red satin dressing gowns, velvety sandals, servants holding glasses of juice for him, doing his bidding every step of the way as he moves around like a crashing tornado, with a brattish nonchalance of manners bordering on mindless brutality. But not to worry! You just wait and see. He will turn out to have a good heart hidden deep under layers of arrogance masking his innate innocence for a while!
In the meantime, Om's mother is driven nearly crazy, unable as she is to get over the resemblance between her son and the new superstar. In a rare non-filmy scene we see the filmy mother dragging along the star's limousine in the manner of a stalker, as he curses her for rousing his conscience and well, nudging memories of his modest birth out of dormancy. Once the reborn Om fills up the gaps in his memory as a full-blown reincarnate, and rather quickly comes to terms with his dark past, he goes back to his family and friends as a reformed man. He admits as much to his present father in the middle of a filmland roust when he wins a best actor's award, the other contestants being real life Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar. In the meantime, he has already won the audience's empathy, even though the storyteller doesn't bother with the likely angst of having to square up a deprived childhood with the glittering wealth of the present. We now have in front of us a hero humbled by the losses of the past and ready to outgrow his infantile self. The story of two separate births turns out to be a mere tale in two parts.
Fully armed with the emotional wealth of an earlier life, the hero is now ready to face his life assignment as an eager adventurer - the obvious challenge being revenge against the villain on Shanti's and Om's behalf! To make that possible at all, the NRI villain promptly makes a comeback in Bollywood after decades and decides do a film with Om. In order to complete the circle of happy endings, the hero has to find a new Shanti of course, who may complement him and whose appearance may cause cracks in the villain's sleek façade and flummox him into erratic behaviour. The idea is to wring evidences for a long-forgotten murder. Another Shanti, a lookalike [Deepika Padukone in a double role] and an aspiring actress is found. She is then made to stage a ghostly, phoenix like rebirth from the ashes. Face to face with an apparition, the incredulous villain goes against his rational instinct and makes a murderous attack all over again. The original guilt comes back swimming promptly to the surface. But even before Om is able to nab the perpetrator, a huge chandelier drops right on top of the villain. Om gets a brief glimpse of the haunting spirit of Shanti, who executes the crash from behind the scenes before waving a final goodbye on her way to redemption. Om is left behind with Shanti's new avatar and a happy ending is obtained. Everything fits in neatly and it's time to go home.
Oscillating between the fairy tale and the epic
Throughout the film I could not help feeling that I was watching a work where at every stage the author takes a step ahead and pauses, as if planning to preempt the audience's expectations, and yet moving along the predicted course, stealing a teasing look at the audience in the meantime. In brief, the surprise is there are no surprises. If the surprise succeeds it is for a very common reason - faced with characters so self-highly conscious of themselves, we intuitively expect them to behave differently from the set Bollywood pattern. But they don't. The filmmaker thus throughout ruthlessly mocks Bollywood and yet ends up making another quintessential Bollywood film. The phrase that occurs to me here is another Bollywoodism - 'thoda hat ke'[somewhat different] - which is reminiscent of the kathavachak tradition in folk culture where every teller of the Ramayana story is invariably and willy nilly thoda hat ke. In the process, the film ends up confirming every cliché, every stereotype, and trope, traditionally used by Bollywood. But instead of feeling cheated, let us admit may be this is the effect the filmmaker wished to create, as she indeed did! And who knows, may be the audience sees in this ongoing scam of repetition and remakes, a reward rather than a swindle!
OSO is a difficult film to analyze for the same reasons that make it interesting. It is Bollywood at its self-conscious best and all the critical points you wish to make as an advocate of realistic daylight cinema are already made by the filmmaker within the text. Additionally, there are also some poignant comments on the power equations in the Bollywood hierarchy. There is thus little else you can add but vent your anger at someone who commits a crime in full awareness and with conviction, an unusual situation in Bollywood, where we critics like to point out the hopeless but also helpless stupidity of the filmmakers, allegedly incapable of anything better. The filmmakers in turn habitually blame the stupid audience of course which is where the buck stops. OSO has thus effectively swallowed, digested and spat decades of criticism and sarcasm faced by Hindi cinema from within India and the west. It is now immune to both the bilious sneering of the educated Indian as well as the uncomprehending mockery of Hollywood.
 In brief, OSO seems to carry a conscious ideology that is visibly embedded in its story line, dialogues and visuals. I feel that the ideology is best summarized in the phrase 'Darde Disco', a startling phrase that seems to simultaneously carry a sense of self-pity and proud assertion. 'Bollywood is cheap, crass, kitschy and gross, and we know it, but what to do, this is what the audience wants', goes one line of argument. 'This is the 'ishtyle' [style] in which we talk of our dreams, sorrows and experiences, and if you can't stomach it, to hell with you, since the audiences love us, and that matters the most', goes the other argument.
Before moving further, let us remember that the junior artist in OSO is also a diehard fan, a film fanatic and this sleight allows the filmmaker to place the audience-cum-junior artist squarely at the centre of the screen. In the second half when Shanti II turns up, she makes it clear that she is more a fan of the star than an aspiring actress. It would seem then that the filmmaker is clearly imposing on the audience the hero-heroine mantle, while the film producer gets painted as a villain in the 'us against them' mode.
With the democratization of the entertainment industry in the post-independence era, an auteur would obviously want to be freed from the enforced patronage of the Bollywood moneybags and connect directly with her film audience. But as students of the entertainment industry, we very well know that such mediations, however much you hate them, cannot be wished away. They are integral parts of the structure and the fabric. Ironically, when the entertainer was able to connect most directly with his audience, it was in pre-industrial and pre-democratic era and mostly under the hopefully benign gaze of a feudal patron. In which case, is the director of OSO trying to share with us one of her own daydreams, namely freedom from the Bollywood movers and shakers and a direct handshake with her audience? Is it a case of the storyteller hugging her audience to point fingers in unison at the producer-villain? Will the audience become willingly complicit to this scheme? These are questions seeking answers. One has to admit that a storyteller seeking autonomy from the financer - producer in our times has two potential pawns or weapons it can use - the crazy fan/audience, and the star he is crazy about. Indeed, the fan-star duo makes the most perfectly 'involved' consumer-commodity pair. People may love cars, shampoos and mixies, but they don't worship them, the way a fan worships her idol. In fact star icons are meta-products used to endorse and sell 'earthly' products like soaps and shampoos. Prima facie, their worthiness as weapons in a director's hands seems fairly assured. The irony is the director-storyteller now ends up becoming a slave to the fan-star duo instead.
Before drawing any more conclusions, there is a moment of bad faith involved here which I wish to magnify and scrutinize. Lest we overlook it, we need to remember that in the maelstrom of the Bollywood industry, it is often difficult to pinpoint the storyteller with any precision. In case of Raj Kapoors and Gurudutts, we clearly knew who our storyteller was. I feel that when Farah Khan collapses the artist/audience/storyteller together in the manner of a folk form, she is indulging in grave self-deception. Let us not forget that in Bollywood it is stars that have fans and not film directors, and quite fittingly, Om in his new avatar in OSO has been shown flitting between film sets and planning the schedules/locations of the film to be financed by the villain producer. The question is - is this a case of an actor Shahrukh Khan doing the job of Farah Khan, a director well-known for her stern intolerance for any interference in her projects? If not, why is the director/auteur missing from Om's new film project? Indeed, in the last scenes of OSO, when Farah Khan, the director arrives in person to attend the celebrations, there is no one waiting to receive her. She finds the stage abandoned and she has to go running after an auto to get back home. Through a brief and somewhat comic sequence she ensures to point out the powerlessness and redundance of the director vis a vis the star and the producer, as also her ability to laugh off her own plight. And this suppressed authorial hurt is what may provide OSO with some links to the agony of Mera Nam Joker and Kagaz Ke Phool. The creative person in the industry is hounded by the ringmaster of a metaphorical circus, as Raj Kapur would put it, or forced to create kagaz ke phool [paper flowers], rather than real ones, as Guru Dutt would put it. In the case of Farah Khan, this hurt is more than compensated by the ecstatic stampede of all the major Bollywood stars, the community of gods from today and yesteryears who bless the film with their presence. A bit like a gathering of all the sects under one ecumenical umbrella! Or a dragooning of all the star brats under the schoolmarmish gaze of a master choreographer! This is a point I will bring up again towards the end of the essay to draw its full significance.
To go back to the earlier themes of 'Darde Disco' and the 'filmy', it is not uncommon for an educated Indian to first enjoy a Hindi film thoroughly and then switch to a critical daylight mode only to analyze the film to bits of infantile incoherence. This ambivalence hides a fundamental truth of Bollywood that requires to be admitted. It is perhaps the same ambivalence that makes Javed Akhtar invent the phrase 'Darde Disco'. I will term it the shame of the daydreamer - once the movie gets over and the hall lights are put on, an audience faces both - the loss of a snug dream and the shrinking of his own infantile self, which he must mask in a hurry. The adult exiting the cinema hall resents the child that walked into it three hours ago.
Indeed, if I must rise above my own ambivalence here, I should begin by pointing out that despite its utter self-consciousness, OSO is one more fairy tale in both its pejorative and non-pejorative senses produced by Bombay. Once I conjure up the image of an eight year old curled up with her grandmother and listening to fairy tales however, most of my infuriating shame over enjoyment of OSO seems to perish. That a grandmother chooses not to dwell on social reality stops bothering. Mind you, fairy tales are not only about projection and fulfillment of desire. According to Bruno Bettelheim (2) among others, an essential component of fairy tales are the obstacles, the fears, and the villains that come in the way of fulfillment, which must be conquered. In the process of arduous struggle, the fulfillment itself acquires a new adult meaning. In fact, there are fairy tales, such as some of Grimm's that come so packed with overpowering horrors that fulfillment or victory may not even seem worthwhile to a lazy daydreamer. The need for horrific content may even be proportional to the prevalent social conditions, e.g. children in a war torn area may require a higher dosage of violence in stories to learn to contend with it. At any rate, if the grandparents of the world tell fairy tales to their grandchildren, it can't be because they wish them turned into passive daydreamers. On their part, if the children did not relish the adventure and looked for fulfillment alone, they won't need to hear fairy tales. They would go for lollipops instead. Fairy tales allow the listener to rehearse the harsh reality and also one's selfhood in imagined scenarios, through both identification and individuation, through a 'what happens if.' kind of reasoning.
And yet, if OSO was entirely and literally the same thing as grandmother's tales, there was no need for a paper like this. The fact that we may need the aid of fairy tales in adulthood is not altogether regrettable. But reluctance to admit the need and the over-elaborateness of adult fairy tales seem to indicate that we don't club them entirely with the fairy tales of childhood. There are thus some glaring dissimilarities between the intimate fairy tale and the Bollywood genre - the technological and social contexts and scales are quite different, but let us try to go beyond such obvious divergences. The sense of grandeur that OSO tries to achieve through elaborate, heroic and public action are attempts, I feel, to give it the semblance of an epic or more accurately a faux epic. If one were not to insist on the canonical requirements or the literary fixtures of an epic or a Mahakavya, both the idea of the 'filmy' and the 'heroic' action would begin to make a new sense. Indeed, between the epic and the fairy tale lie a number of gray categories like Khandkavya, ballads and elaborate yarns of adventure that approximates the epic form. Perhaps the stringent requirements of an epic prescribed by our classical acharyas are only attempts to ensure that we in our unrestrained egotism don't end up claiming cosmic significance for all our experiences.
It is possible to claim that in OSO as also in Bollywood generally, we are perhaps dealing with two extremes of reality, first, in its private fairy tale sense of intimate dreams, visions and desires on the one hand, and on the other, an epic cosmic stage, where human life as such becomes the target of reflection. This is a stage where the mundane social realities as we know them, do not figure except in broad brush strokes. And here again the phrase 'Darde disco' [pain caused by disco kitsch or pain seen as disco kitsch?] too would make sense as the yoking of private pain with the wide public arena of the dance floor. No wonder, Hindi cinema has to work hard to make space for social reality in its prosaic sense, and the drudge job has to be performed by the countless small screens of the TV soap, in a curious division of labour. OSO requires us to take a leap from the baby's crib to a galactic stage, from fairy tale to epic proportions, as the workaday social reality gets lost in the creases of this gigantic fabric.
 The magnification of the fairy tale into the epic spectacle however, is not an easy task, requiring tremendous narrative stretching and performative wizardry, which may explain the presence of the songs, the Nautanki-Tamasha element, and the comical distractions etc., which both threaten the structural integrity of the Bollywood narrative form and also lend it the stamp of uniqueness. Additionally, to contrast an OSO with global mythologies like Spiderman, Batman or Krish, OSO is not about a fight between the good and the evil in a mundane sense, but about what happens within the self, in arenas made of the hearts and the souls of the audience. OSO does not deal with evil declared as evil out there but with the evil that that spumes out of the strife between desires and their fulfillment or frustration. The chief binary concern of OSO in brief, is not goodness-badness but innocence-corruption. The difference between goodness and innocence lies in that you can try and become good, but you cannot try and attain innocence. Similarly, you may not be demonstrably bad, but your soul may carry a rot within. Let us say, goodness is a worthwhile heroic quality only when it is built over the foundations of innocence. In this sense, the idea of innocence is somewhat comparable to 'internalized' goodness as a driven form of goodness rather than conscious ethical policy.
Unfortunately, despite its literary or characterological appeal, the innocence-corruption binary does not translate easily into either modern public ethics or juridical discourse. And indeed, innocence in this sense can be a dangerous ethical/political category - you see clear glimpses of it in the Idi Amin of 'The Last King of Scotland [2007]' in its initial stages (3). You get a brief glimpse of it in the menacing character that Shahrukh portrays in his new birth in OSO before he encounters his past. It also defines the inimitable political style and humour of a Laloo Yadav. You get the most fulsome view of it in the life of the most playful, the most amoral and yet the wisest Krishna, as a stealer of butter in infancy, as a wandering playboy in youth, and a statesman in adulthood. Brajbhasha and Awadhi are rife with poetry admiring the infant Krishna's lies and thefts. Theft - limitless sexual license - ruthless cunning thus emerges as the distilled ethical essence of Krishna's life, unless you have a notion of innocence to make him seem acceptable, indeed adorable, and ascribe godliness to him, auralizing his mundane actions into 'leela' [ludum, play] in the process.
It would thus seem that yoking of the snug intimacy of the fairy tale with the spectacular heroism of the epic is very likely Bollywood's method of creating showbiz deities and gods of our times. And the 'leelas' of their lives connect with both our fairytale and epic imagination. Clearly, according to Bollywood, despite the risks involved, innocence stands as a greater value than goodness, and is even claimed as the true basis for natural rather than assumed or cultivated goodness. It is a quality that raises you above ordinary mortals.
Alternating between reverence and ridicule: the existential jugglery of OSO:
Through my reflections on OSO, I have thus far only extended the task that Farah Khan took up in the film - to trace the trajectory of the desires of a movie fanatic, an aspiring hero, and see what an individual does with the raw material of his desires and fantasies. Let us put down this chain of desire and fulfillment - you want to meet your movie idol? Alright, here she is, as her chunni gets stuck in your buttonhole in a stroke of destiny. You want to be a star? You get even better - you are reborn as the only child of a superstar. You want your idol to fall in love with you? You get an even better deal. Your idol comes to your embrace as your fan. What else do you want of life? But yes, in order to attain any of this you have to immolate yourself in the fire of love, and out of your ashes, a world of fulfillment is created.
Before we wind up the analysis of OSO however, there is a task that still remains only partly attended. We now need to again give due attention to two brief but crucial moments in the film, when Farah Khan places herself outside the main text to make a statement on Bollywood. In an early scene, Om and Farah khan are shown to be struggling over a jacket thrown by Rishi Kapoor to the audience. The scuffle is presumably over the legacy of the past (4). The implications of this tug of war become apparent towards the end when Farah Khan turns up to join the celebrations on the stage, a major highlight of the film also discussed earlier, only to find there is no one waiting for her. Over time, Om is able to acquire the mantle of a star but the Farah Khan at the end of the tale is left grasping at wisps of nothingness. Her redundance and exclusion from the grand Bollywood show at the end of the film is made starkly apparent. She is seen rushing in and out in a common auto. No limousines for a lowly director, she seems to admit, as she leaves the stage in sullen haste.
The point is - is Farah Khan's repeated presence comparable to the casual appearances made by Subhash Ghai, the maker of Karz in his own films. Or is there more to it? We do have a choice here. We could declare these interventions insignificant and ignore them. I am of the opinion that even though Farah Khan leaves the implied humiliation and the neglect in the above scene altogether unarticulated, it is difficult to dismiss her last gesture of self-mockery. While these brief appearances of the storyteller take self-reflection to new heights, they are also quite disturbing.
Long ago, Gurudutt's Kagaz Ke Phool dwelled on the auteur's soul agonies, stretching matters to the point of unashamed self-indulgence and self-pity, and Raj Kapur raised his creative conflicts and passion for women to epic levels. If one were to take a rather mean-minded and 'dard e disco' view of their grandstanding, both men seem to grieve over the loss of women 'created' by them, a bit like being abandoned by their Pygmalion. Farah Khan on the other hand, decides to mask her own auteurial plight, her 'dard' [creative agony] in a crass disco din instead of making an issue out of it. May be that is why the director ends up laughing off her own creative agony as an uncaring voyeur unto her own work, condemning her soul pain as a cacophonous 'dard e disco'. May be it is simply a sign of changing times and changing rules of the industry. But the ambivalence reflected here is troubling - we here have a woman storyteller who shows enormous empathy and humanity in transforming the kitschy sentiments of Om into a near sublime epic, and then ends up jeering at her own auteurial efforts. Is this a reflection on the self-regard of a director in our times?
I am not sure that the above voyeur-empathizer conflict can be resolved easily. I am also not sure if you can revere and ridicule human angst in the same breath, especially when it happens to be your own. Or does this ambivalence reflect the auteur's discomfort at releasing a genie out of the bottle - a star out of a junior artist? How can I tell! But I can imagine a long line of Bollywood directors crouching under the gigantic shadows of several generations of godly stars consecrated by them, and wondering - was it part of my original purpose? Like a conscientious craftsman, you first create an image, then like a priest you consecrate it into deityhood. But you are horrified to find that at the end of all the narrative rituals, the idol refuses to immerse - there is no visarjan. Instead a huge monster called the star emerges out of the submarine depths of public consciousness and occupies the stage till long after the show.
The auteur now seems to have an impressive lineup of adversaries - the old style producer-distributor, the new corporate honcho - and the star, which together turn the storyteller into a largely titular authority. Well, well, well! If this take on OSO sounds slippery, the following lines from the great Portuguese poet Pessoa would confirm that too hard a look at an author's intentions lead you into a Babel-like eddy of ambiguities:
"Autopsychography"
The poet is a faker. He
Fakes it so completely,
He even fakes he's suffering
The pain he's really feeling.
And those of us who read his writing
Fully feel while reading
Not that pain of his that's double,
But one completely fictional.
So on its tracks goes round and round,
To entertain the reason,
That wound-up little train
We call the heart of man.
- translated by Edwin Honig
Whatever the 'real' intent of the storyteller, it becomes apparent that OSO and perhaps Bollywood look at themselves with an opportunistic mix of reverence and ridicule, of adoration and contempt. Om [and his mother as well as his sidekick] reveres his kitschy dreams with much piety but doesn't fail to ridicule them. The audience reveres the stars in the darkness of the cinema hall but dismisses them with contempt in daylight. The director reverentially creates spectacles whose reality she keeps questioning. The director also creates stars that begin to cast an eclipsing shadow on her own self-regard. Finally, the creative agony of the storyteller gets drowned in the din of 'Dard e disco' as an ecstatic consummation of artistic satiety and a monumentally loud burp. This is an exact reversal of the desire-fulfillment sequence. It brings to me the image of a devotee face to face with divinity in a very unlikely state - guffawing at her idol's deformities and insignificance into one audio channel, and mumbling respectful prayers in the other. Gurudutt's reading of a similar situation was that the world is afflicted by inadequacies even as he brooded on his own. Raj Kapoor questioned the reality of the circus with vedantic profoundness despite his secularism and came to the conclusion that impenetrable avidya of maya is all we have, reflected in the song 'Jeena yahan, marna yahan, iske siwa jana kahan! [we live here, we die here, there is nowhere else to go]. He was of course using show business as a metaphor for human life itself and vice versa. As for Farah Khan, she decides not to take herself seriously at all! Or if she does, she won't let us know!
To put this chaotic assemblage of the 'auteurial selfs' into perspective, one needs to ask - how does it become existentially possible for popular culture to live with a cocktail ontology of reverence and ridicule? Let me try to throw some light on it at the risk of sounding split-headed myself. Popular culture in India entered a phase of secularization barely a century ago and the process still carries on. The secularization process should be seen however not as a linear matter since it seems to consist of an undulating dialectical chain of sacralization - desacralization - re-sacralization - desacralization. If this sounds opaque, remind yourself of the innumerable Saraswati [or Durga or Ganpati etc. etc.] pujas where throngs of youth play item songs from movies to create forms of ecstasy quite unrelated to religion and yet part of religious proceedings. Remind yourself of a festive fair in temple in a small town where bar girls imported from Bombay gyrate in front of local brass, police officials, and common populace [except women perhaps] who devoutly ogle at the exposed women. Devout and near sacrilegious, such orgiastic behaviour seems to come together in some kind of Dard e disco - a sutra and a site where the sweet gentleness of love explodes into an orgiastic explosion of blood, mucous and bile.
The question of how popular culture deals with the binaries of phantasy-reality, worship-sacrilege and reverence-ridicule and how a person copes with life situations by juggling between them is an issue not to be settled in a hurry, e. g. in an essay on OSO. It requires analysis of many texts, forms, rituals, performances and events to even begin tackling a puzzle that the educated often solve by promptly declaring such cultural traits as vulgar and tasteless without looking at the internal structure of such 'vulgarities', making prompt judgments which insulate and protect us from the infuriating reality of popular culture (5). It is as if the pedant in us names or adjective-ises an object and sits back smugly in the belief that we now have a good knowledge of the object.
Before moving on to the last segment of the essay, I feel the need to candidly reveal what I understand of why I enjoyed OSO a lot more than the usual run of Bollywood films. The reasons behind my liking ironically, seem related to what I also found disturbing. The roller-coaster ride between reverence-ridicule, and between heroism-averageness, I believe lends the film and its characters a peculiar charm. Om turns out to be a lovable character precisely because the immodesty and the enormity of his dreams make him very vulnerable. In the first half when he jumps into the fire to save Shanti, it is because he would do it for anyone. In fact Om is taken aback at his own impulsive feat, not having ready plans to see how it feels to commit a good act. In the second half his elaborate scheme to punish the villain is driven by a desire to come to terms with his own neurosis. Shanti, the star too sits in symmetry with Om - no wild dreams here, as all she wants is a marriage and a child. Most of all, one can detect a consistent rhythm of ascent and descent in a narrative where the protagonists alternately rise and fall in their greatness. To elaborate, OSO unlike the usual run of Bollywood avoids a linear, one way progression from a fairy tale to epic grandeur (6). Time and again, it keeps returning to a modest fairy tale level attaining levels of intimacy with the audience commensurate with the fairy tale format as many other good Bollywood films do. In the same vein, when the director makes a modest bow before the audience, one is compelled to cheer a diffident little girl lost in the wilderness of show biz.
Conclusion
I am now compelled to end this round of my discussion on OSO somewhat abruptly but heavy-heartedly for a number of reasons that seem pressing to me. First, I feel there is something like interpretive fatigue or satiety that persuades me to leave OSO aside, at least for the time being and move on to other self-reflective Bollywood texts mentioned at the outset. Second, I suddenly notice a hallucinatory visitation on the horizon, and wish to obviate the experience of seeing the cosmos in a single film text, somewhat like Yashoda's epiphany when she looked into infant Krishna's mouth. Third, I am aware I came dangerously close to pronouncing judgments on an author's 'real' intent. But this temptation is only as unforgivable as unstoppable. Last, the world outside the text beckons me to step out and take a long deep breath. Dwelling too long within a text can lead to claustrophobic sensation in a fickle exegete like me, unaccustomed as I am to unending hermeneutic gyrations of a believer within the confines of a 'the' book.
To leave epics and fairy tales aside and to conclude on a daylight note, isn't it interesting that akin to the junior artist [an 'extra' in politically incorrect language] Om in OSO, a choreographer [dance master] has made the stalwarts of the movie industry dance to her tune and stampede for brief glimpses in front of the camera, in the manner of overeager junior artists? Hasn't Farah khan told us a Bollywood tale never told before? Bollywood may be pullulating with all the star sons for sure, but we have of late had 'fight masters' and makeup men directing the tallest of Bollywood stars. It is now possible for us to wait for an inspired light boy for a kathavachak, who would descend from the catwalk to give us a new perspective on Bollywood, if not the next Bollywood epic. That the hierarchy within Bollywood is seen crumbling through OSO, does prove Farah Khan's point - a daydream goes a long way and the troubled desires of an underdog's infancy and youth may indeed find appeasement tomorrow. As in cinema, so in society! Insha Allah! Om Shanti Om!
Notes/ references
| 1. |
Notably, in a therapeutic situation, the therapist is expected to react skeptically to a patient's confessions and has to come to his own conclusions. Even a police interrogator is likely to turn suspicious when confessions come far too readily or voluntarily. |
| 2. |
Bettleheim, Bruno, 1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales<, Knopf, New York |
| 3. |
I find it difficult to forget the mesmeric traction felt by the character of the young British medico falling hopelessly for the charms of Amin, and losing his ethical compass right till the end when he has to violently tear himself away. |
| 4. |
Subhash Ghai's "Karz' [1980] inspired OSO. Karz in turn is supposed to be inspired by The Reincarnation of Peter Proud [1975]. The movie was remade into Tamil by Kamal Hassan in 1984 as 'Enakkul Oruvan' and in Kannada by Ravichandran as 'Yugapurasha'. 2008 saw another rebirth of the tale in 'Karzzz', by Satish Kaushik. |
| 5. |
As I write these lines on the penultimate day of Chhath, a sun festival in Bihar, the loudspeakers in the neighbourhood have switched from devotional songs to the usual 'item' numbers from Hindi films. At sundown, after thirty six hours of severe fasting, the populace can now feast on milk and rice and also bomb its ears with sexy numbers before going on a twenty four hour fast again. Cultural commentators continue to harp that these are modern distortions, a claim which I continue to refuse to believe. The so-called 'modern distortions' seem more like modern middle class wishfulness and ostrich like defensive behaviour to me. |
| 6. |
The outcome of such progression is very interesting-it seems to lead to a new sort of realism spawned by the Bollywood phantasy machine. I wonder if such organic realism may flourish in the coming years, enabling Bollywood to move beyond its present narrative crisis. |
Dr Ratnakar Tripathy is Senior Research Fellow, Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna. An earlier draft of this essay was read at a seminar 'Bhojpuri and Other Cinemas' at the Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna on 22 August, 2008. Originally planned as the last part of a monograph on the theme of self-reflection in Bollywood, as mirrored in the oeuvres of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, and Subhash Ghai, the paper in its present shape can be read on its own.
Om Shanti Om is indeed an astonishingly unusual product from Bollywood. It perhaps even signals the moment when mainstream Hindi cinema became 'Bollywood' - as a brand. There is very little to add to the extended analysis provided by the author but, as he suggests, OSO works like an advertisement for Bollywood. Unlike Singing in the Rain, from which it takes quite a bit, it has actual actors appearing as themselves and doing onscreen what gossip magazines say they do in real life. It pours ridicule on Bollywood even while eulogizing it but 'self-parody' is often the way self-confident brands appear in their own advertisements.
Editor
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