In the halcyon early days of 2011, UTV Group launched a TV channel dedicated to Bollywood. A vote of confidence. Strong, resounding. Today’s cynics would say: dated.
This was a splendid year for such a venture because Aamir Khan had just done the Mambo in a semi-erotic absurdist number in Delhi Belly, Katrina Kaif had used her broken Hindi to turn in a radiant performance as an Anglo-Indian swashbuckler in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Rockstar marked the last great AR Rahman album for almost half a decade to come, Chillar Party entered the league of films like Taare Zameen Par (2007) which documented kids not as kids but as champions in their own right, their sandcastles as real real estate, their infatuations as seamless as their school-uniform inseams, their skirmishes as scandalous as a character in Delhi Belly. We had it so good, it might seem, with audacity and mediocrity married in a big jangly mess, the whiplash of loud, anthemic drums, the confluence of Pakistani and other international performers, the melding of cinematic traditions with such aplomb that masala films paled, shrivelled up and vanished.
There was also a tabloid, not affiliated with UTV, whose central spreads were the talk of the town; today it was Miranda Kerr sunbathing for glossies, tomorrow, Prateik Babbar, um, “Slogging It Out!” News was always slow, brewing delicious gaps of sensory eclipse, and a fine layer of glittering expectancy serenaded all forms of life. On the way back on the school bus, a prominent stone wall was perennially emblazoned with a poster for the next blockbuster. We waited with bated breath for the bus to turn a corner, rattling onto the main street. Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011). Everybody cheers. Eventually, the channel shut shop and the poster was torn down some years ago. Bollywood, that great Bombay cotton mill of fabrications, is a tide going through its motions. This year, with its succession of hard-won victories in the form of action blockbusters and old-school family dioramas, it is sweating it out. It is making the sun rise again.
Jawan (2023), Shah Rukh Khan’s second caper of the year after Pathaan, rides on the coattails of an apocryphal personal resurgence of the star, which is also a stand-in for contemporary Bollywood itself. Khan, in a three-decade-long career, has journeyed a whole gamut of portrayals, from dreary creeps (Darr (1993), Fan (2016), Zero (2018)) to outsized patriots (Swades (2004), Chak De! India (2007)), and bashful, arduous, luminous lovers almost everywhere else. With his latest offering, he amalgamates his syncretic cinematic identity and soars in a patchwork sky of the nation’s many anxieties. After the commercial failures of other ambitious and experimental works, he seems to have retreated into an arena so far frequented only by Salman Khan and his noncommittal apostles. He’s back with a vengeance. This is not new for him; in Asoka (2001), Josh (2001), Don (2006), Don 2 (2011), and Raees (2017), Khan effortlessly shed his sequined slipskin for action that was burlesque and its own spectacle. His choices reflect the consternations of the Hindi film industry, whose share of the market appears to be depleting every year. South Indian film industries seem to be ruling the roost. Even Jawan is not quite a Hindi film proper, as it is helmed and co-starred by Attlee, Vijay Sethupathi and Nayanthara, respectively, all of whom are Tamil-language titans. In a manner similar to Steven Spielberg remarking that Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible venture saved their industry, plaudits and confetti could rain on Khan’s box office harvest, already poised to not only be a comeback diptych but a triumphant troika (Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki later this year) without sceptics questioning why one of our best stars had to resort to the cinematic equivalent of aloo chat (extending the nice sobriquet of masala films). It is an unsaid, floating, pixie dust of a question. It permeates every single ticket.
The 100-crore club loomed large in the early 2010s. Aamir Khan heralded the trend of commercial success being measured against this benchmark through Ghajini (2008), sending a generation of kids like me to bug their adult cousins with irksome inanities such as, ‘Was Delhi-6 a hit?’ (“No, but the songs were”), ‘Was Guzaarish a hit?’ (“No, but it was a cute affair”), ‘Was Mere Brother Ki Dulhan a hit’ (“I don’t really know, man, Imran should really . . . .”). Our obsession with ticket sales pulls back another veneer off the great dream-making machine: profitability, which, in some weird semantic shuffle, came to be the only barometer of filmic success. This opened the industry to the vagaries of a fickle market, where salacious delusions were dependable (for some time), narrative purpose and integrity sacrificed at the altar of our crude realities. Cinema, however, remained an experience. For Indian audiences—some of whom still climb their plush seats and more than pirouette to songs and obstruct others’ view—it was a heavenly respite from the blaring overcast Indian week: plastering visuals with the ballast and rubble of people talking onto our eyeballs. The seductive hold of the confines of a cinema hall was resplendent, and by all accounts hardly replaceable. With the rise of OTT media, it wafted out of our lives like a dove whose wing just mended.
Experts have stated that the pandemic has birthed a new sensibility of cinema, where, reduced to handy screens and regularly overwhelmed by the mundane horror of the real world, the topiary of emotion was lost. What this means is that films were reduced to content, which is fine. It has been a thing that people do: buy VHS tapes, pause and rewind the tasty bits, maybe even take a break for cheesecake. But all VHS tape parties were in some measure laced with the awe and anticipation that could only be found at a movie hall, and every iteration of pressing PLAY on the device was a tableau recreated in that image. The VHS, DVDs, our Blu-rays—these were not our first introductions to the media at hand. It was akin to placing a keepsake on a shelf from a lovely vacation. OTT media has convinced us of the impossible joys of living our entire vacations through souvenirs and mementoes without ever stepping out. Give it enough time, and, borrowing from Plato’s cave, that comes to be the only expectation from cinema: two hours of mythmaking glued by the adhesion of boredom, dashed by unceremonious intervals (where life happens to us), fractured by not a sense of discovery but a weariness that is unparalleled.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the 100-crore club was the great tragedy of contemporary Hindi cinema. As Salman Khan, with all due respect, doled out middling if chucklesome potboilers (see Dabangg 2 (2012), Bodyguard (2010), Ready (2011), Kick (2015)), there was hardly room for mid-budget adventures, not counting Ayushmann Khurrana’s outsized oeuvre of middlebrow, large-hearted extravaganzas towards the tally. All of a sudden, actors from all walks of life were in an undeclared marathon, where Ajay Devgn, that great journeyman with the trusty credo of whatever, had to usher in with Singham (2010) a movie that set in motion a series of dominoes that gave us the vacuous and crude Simmba (2018) and Sooryavanshi (2021) (all steered by Rohit Shetty, known for his Golmaal (2006—present) films). The Indian cinematic timeline beginning from 2008 is riddled with similar chain reactions steeped in abysmal merit, eroding the joy of watching a memorable film at the cinema by deconstructing that singular pleasure into its antecedents—suspension of disbelief, rooting for a hero, the romance, the dance number, the challenge, the resolution, the climax—and repacking them with the passion and fury of someone who woke up really late for a flight that was utterly early. My evaluation, of course, takes me back to how Marvel’s superhero movies have amassed tremendous condemnation, with our leaders of film thought lambasting their development as parasitic, cantankerous and noxious to cinema. OTT brisked away the superficial charms of even this variety, leaving cinema halls’ doors groaning with disuse.
Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani (2023) was a fascinating time at the movies. I watched it immediately after the credits rolled on Barbie (2023), and the difference in audio-visual bombardment was, not to put too fine a point upon it, mesmerising. It is a grand, messy holiday hoopla, incandescent with charged performances and an awareness that this, this, could be something. A blast from the past: the humble OMG (2012) has a sequel, which is also similarly modest but seems to be doing fine. It is the return of these films that I personally see as the great vanguard of thematic diversity in Hindi cinema. When people remark that Bollywood is back, they often refer to the commercial viability of the cinema produced for (and not always by) Hindi-speaking people. Bollywood, as we knew it for a decade and a half, is hopefully on the back foot. True Bollywood, crammed with the ingenuity that has defined it for more than a century, alighted on the wings of storytelling valour, held aloft on the brawny shoulders of a million-strong crowd who have a sense of memory, for whom every morsel of rice brings to mind, in Proustian fashion, the thespian largesse of a shiver-inducing, heartrending Shammi Kapoor in Professor (1962)... that Bollywood, is back. It finally has a song to sing.
