Greed is (Now) Good

My piece for the Indian Express Eye's Diwali issue on money.

Once, bad guys had all the cash. But like the audience, contemporary Hindi cinema has learnt to listen respectfully when money does the talking.

Raj Kapoor and Nadira in the magisterial Shree 420

What can one say about the changing status of money in Hindi films? First off, I suppose, that there’s more of it on screen than there used to be. Unlike the largely well-off heroes of today, the protagonists of so many 1950s and ’60s classics were either born into poverty, or had it thrust upon them — their heroism was often about earning enough to survive, and trying to stay honest while they did so. This was true whether the film was set in the village or the city. The characters played by Nargis in Mother India, Dilip Kumar in Naya Daur or Guru Dutt in Pyaasa were all about maintaining their moral fibre despite all manner of tragedies. Money would not, could not sway them from their scruples — which might involve the defence of chastity, community, or artistic integrity. Another kind of hero was allowed to be more fallible, and we watched as he struggled to keep his conscience in a world jingling with monetary temptation: think of Dev Anand in Baazi (1951), House No. 44 (1955), Guide (1965) or Jewel Thief (1967), or Raj Kapoor in Awara (1951) or Shree 420 (1955).

It is not surprising that in both categories, those who already had money were usually villains, feudal or capitalist: the lecherous baniya Sukhilala, unmoved by the sufferings of Nargis and her children; the crooked city-returned Kundan (Jeevan) in Naya Daur, so keen to capitalise on technology that he would destroy a whole village economy; the publisher Ghosh (Rehman) in Pyaasa, so avid in his pursuit of profit that he conspires to have a man locked up and declared dead. As long as the Hindi film hero was a struggler, the rich man was likely to be a source of corruption, or conflict, or both — think of Seth Sonachand in Shree 420, who tries his best to turn the honest Raj to crime by means of the glittering Nadira, whose character is literally named Maya: illusion.

When it was playing things lighter, popular Hindi cinema sold an alternative fantasy to its largely working-class audiences: here the hero who was poor would eventually luck out, either by discovering that he was high-born and thus an heir to great wealth, or by getting the pretty rich girl anyway. But, usually, unless he was the father of the hero or the heroine (and sometimes even then), the big man in the palatial Hindi film home was always guilty until proven innocent, slimy until proven straight. In that cinematic universe, even villains conceded that money was always ill-gotten: “Daulat ka pedh jab bhi ugta hai, paap ki zameen mein hi ugta hai (The tree of wealth always grows in the soil of sin),” as Amjad Khan declared in Kaalia (1981).

The Amitabh Bachchan era marked a partial shift in this valorising of mehnat ki mazdoori. To be sure, Bachchan did carry on a certain kind of socialist film tradition as the labouring hero battling crooked capitalists — Coolie (1983) is perhaps the most memorable example. But he also embodied the intense disillusionment of the 1970s and ’80s, lending his baritone to a growing rage against a world in which the straight and narrow was beginning to seem a path to eternal poverty. Still, the Bachchan hero’s pursuit of wealth was never just about the good life — he might seem coolly stylish, even shaukeen, but the money was really meant to plug the gaping emotional hole in his soul. In Trishul (1978), for instance, his creation of a business empire is really about destroying the man who once abandoned his pregnant mother; in Deewar (1975), his quest for riches is a way of avenging the poverty of his childhood. But as that film’s classic Salim-Javed dialogue made abundantly clear to the millions who grew up on it, money couldn’t buy you love. “Aaj mere paas buildingey hai, property hai, bank balance hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai. Kya hai, kya hai tumhare paas?” demands a belligerent Bachchan of his honest policeman brother (Shashi Kapoor), only to be crushed by the retort “Mere paas Maa hai.” The very vocabulary of trade was a tainted one: as Nirupa Roy says plaintively to Bachchan in the same film: “Tu bahut bada saudagar hai re, lekin apni maa ko khareedne ki koshish mat kar. (You’re a big businessman, but don’t try to buy your mother.)”

The years after liberalisation have changed our cinema a great deal, as they have changed us. From clapping for the self-made Bachchan hero who refuses phenke huye paise in Deewaar or rises in rage in Trishul at the idea that his ambitions might stem from having come into his baap dada ki daulat, we have reached a stage where we can smile indulgently at Ranbir Kapoor when he introduces himself to Konkona Sensharma in Wake Up Sid (2009) with “Main? Main apne dad ke paise kharch karta hoon (Me? I spend my dad’s money).”

It is now alright to have money, as well as to aspire to it. And the making of money need no longer be couched as serving some emotional need — the ends can often justify the means. In Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007), the capitalist who smuggles in machine parts and manipulates the stock market — a screen character rather closely allied to the real-life Dhirubhai Ambani — is no longer the villain but the hero. More recently, in Raees (2016), a liquor-selling ganglord is presented to us as the heroic outcome of an entrepreneurial society where the independent single mother — an updated Nirupa Roy character — is now one who teaches her son that no business is too small, and no religion is bigger than business. “Hamare liye koi koi bhi dhandha chhota nahi hota, aur dhandhe se bada koi dharam nahi hota.”

Such money-making baniya heroes are still infrequent. Barring the steady trickle of small-town/middle class films, Bollywood seems to reflect the wide disparity created by money in the new India. On the one hand are the likes of Saif Ali Khan, Ranbir Kapoor or the newly-arrived Barun Sobti playing the haves, whose search for selfhood involves looking beyond money (Chef, Tamasha, Tu Hai Mera Sunday). The other features the have-nots, for whom money would remain out of reach if they stayed honest, must either win world-scale lotteries as Emraan Hashmi-style confidence men, or steal, as in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye or Simran, or — as in the Anurag Kashyap gangster film — sell their souls into violent crime.

Published in the Indian Express, 15 October 2017.

Miya-Baniya Bhai Bhai?

My Mirror column:
Raees has its slow bits, but those dismissing it as politically tepid filmmaking are missing the wood for the trees.

Before making Raees, Rahul Dholakia made Parzania whose release was blocked in Gujarat by Sangh Parivar networks. Parzania and Raees have little in common on the surface. Although I thought it came off as distressingly inauthentic – it featured jarring English, with a pointless American character as the witnessing 'I' -- Parzania was pitched as a realistic 'political' film, with Naseeruddin Shah and Sarika turning in affecting performances as the distraught parents of a Parsi boy who went missing in the communal violence of Gujarat 2002, in which over 2000 Muslims were killed. Raees, in stark contrast, is pitched as entertainment: a big-banner Bollywood production with Shah Rukh Khan in the title role of a small-time bootlegger who rises to power and notoriety during an era of Prohibition.

What the two films share, of course, is an investment in the history of Gujarat's present. But the risks they take are very different. Parzania sought to wrangle audience sympathy at the lowest common denominator by constructing an utterlessly blameless victim – a child, and one who belonged to neither of the communities actively involved in the Gujarat violence. With Raees, Dholakia might be said to move in the opposite direction: giving us a textbook antihero.

In Raees, we have a protagonist who must remain both attractive and sympathetic while running a business empire that is entirely illegal and often violent, not to mention based on supplying a socially-disapproved product like alcohol. And most important, whether Shah Rukh Khan wishes to underplay the matter or not, it is absolutely important for the optics of this film that this protagonist is a Muslim in a Gujarat where the Hindutva project is on its way to political and social hegemony. Else why would the makers drive the point home with such marvellous bantering precision, emphasising even in the trailer that what makes Raees admirable is the fact that he combines in himself “Baniye ka dimaag, Miyabhai ki daring”? Miya is colloquial-speak for Muslims in several parts of India including Gujarat, and it is heavily marked – making the very use of the word 'Miyabhai' new for a mainstream Hindi film. But what is so remarkable about the power of Hindi cinema is that it can change the word's valence.

Despite the fact that the gangster film is an accepted genre -- in which such shades-of-gray protagonists are perhaps now the norm -- it seems clear to me that the greater creative-political gamble is Raees rather than Parzania. The rise of the gangster – in life as in cinema – is tied to the rise of organised crime in dense urban settlements. Sharp social and economic inequalities produce systems outside the system, with mob-lords emerging as alternative centres of power who are feared and revered in equal measure. Dholakia's portrait of Raees – modelled loosely on the real-life figure of Gujarati don Abdul Latif – is very much in this vein: a hero shown to live by his own personal code, in which violence is always the last resort, and the poor and innocent must not suffer.

At the centre of the film's construction of our sympathies is the idea of a system whose institutionalised hypocrisies are almost bound to produce crime. Dholakia does well to simultaneously appeal here to our entrenched belief in Gujarat as an entrepreneurial society, in which money will get made if there is money to be made: as SRK's Raees puts it, “Gujarat ki hawa mein byaapaar hai saheb. Aap meri saans ko toh rok lo, lekin is hawa ko kaise rokoge?”

In fact it is this uncompromising business ethic that is offered to us -- a mainstream, largely Hindu audience that might have otherwise little sympathy for the Muslim ganglord supplier of illegal, perhaps immoral daru -- as the reason to respect him. Raees is shown growing up with an independent-minded single mother who teaches him his life lessons even if she isn't in a position to help him with his school ones, and the lesson she teaches him most of all is that no business is too small, and no religion is bigger than business. “Hamare liye koi koi bhi dhandha chhota nahi hota, aur dhandhe se bada koi dharam nahi hota.” This is a thought that resonates both with an old-style Amitabh Bachchan/Salim-Javed appeal to dignity and khuddaari (self-reliance in “Main phenke hue paise nahi uthhata” mode), and allows the otherness of the 'Miyabhai' to be embraced via the familiarity of the 'Baniya'.

The Amitabh Bachchan film referenced in the film is Kaala Patthar, but it was Coolie that came to mind for me. The Apni Duniya dream is exactly the same as Amitabh's in Coolie: of independent little houses for poor working class people. Except that it is no longer a Prem Chopra or a Kader Khan but a Raees who makes that promise – the Muslim boy who dreams for his community is one who has risen up from it. It rings sadly true that that dream, in a film four decades after Coolie, must still fall through the cracks.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Feb 2017.