Back to the Shalimar I & II

Posted on November 17, 2014 by admin

Shalimar is unlike any other Indian film. Rishi Majumder revisits a non-classic.

PART I

History rewards victory, not ambition. Pyaasa, Mughal-e-Azam, Sholay, Deewar, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and, now, a Happy New Year, are likely to be celebrated decades after their release. There will be endless analysis around what made them hits or critical successes, nostalgia pieces on their 50^th anniversaries, new books around their making, and interviews with ageing stars and filmmakers

Not that these aren’t useful. I would really like to know, for instance, what made Happy New Year a hit. All I have to thank the film for, after three painful hours, is that it brought back memories of Shalimar, a 1978 movie quite unlike anything Bollywood has ever seen, and a financial and critical disaster.

In a tribute to Shalimar, Happy New Year revolves around a group of people trying to steal diamonds by beating the ‘Shalimar Security System’, introduced to viewers with Shalimar’s title song—Mera Pyaar Shalimar—playing as a hat doff.

Also, the bunch of thieves in Happy New Year are described repeatedly as “losers” who’re trying to be “winners”. This is reminiscent, perhaps unintentionally, of Shalimar’s maker, Krishna Shah.

A creature of lesser Hollywood, the filmmaker has to his credit smaller genre movies (comedy and horror) such as Hard Rock Zombies, Evil Laugh, Ted & Venus and American Drive-In. A UCLA and Yale graduate, before Shalimar Shah had adapted the play The River Niger, and directed on and off Broadway theatre (one of them Rabindranath Tagore’s The Dark Chamber which won two Obies). He’d written for TV too (Six Million Dollar Man, The Flying Nun and The Man From UNCLE) and produced the animated Ramayana in 1992, and one of India’s early ‘indie’ films Hyderabad Blues.

Yet Shah never made it to the Hollwyood A list. Shalimar was his only attempt at a big blockbuster. Indian papers were full of news about him then, especially after he signed Rex Harrison. But everything was forgotten soon after the movie bombed.

The plot of the film involves four master thieves entering into a contest with one another to try and steal the “Shalimar ruby” from the biggest master thief of them all. Four master thieves and Bollywood strongman Dharmendra, who gatecrashes the competition.

It’s atrocious, but has an audacity to it that’s endearing: it features Hollywood actors like Rex Harrison, Sylvia Miles and John Saxon alongside Hindi film stars Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman and Shammi Kapoor— something no other Hindi film has done to this extent. It was released in Hindi in India and in English in the USA (as Raiders of the Sacred Stone). Both versions failed.

One really wonders what prompted Rex Harrison—Tony, Golden Globe and Oscar winner for Best Actor—after having played the iconic parts of Julius Caesar, Henry Higgins, Pope John Paul II and Dr. Dolittle, to agree to portray a Bollywood arch-villain. One imagines Harrison—now, sadly, no more, then nearing 70—would have prepared for Shalimar alongside Staircase (with Richard Burton) and Crossed Swords (with Charlton Heston). So around the same time he was essaying the considerably more complex roles of an ageing gay Londoner running a barbershop and the 16^th Century Duke of Norfolk, Harrison also played Sir John Lockheed— a retired but paranoid master-thief living on an island, with many tribal slaves and Dharmendra to handle. Not that the other two movies did much better. Both were critically panned and turkeys at the box office. Harrison himself reportedly hated Staircase. It would be interesting to find out what he made of Shalimar.

Then there’s Sylvia Miles of Greenwich Village. If you ask around New York, the story you’re most likely to hear about Miles involves her throwing a plate of food on critic John Simon’s head. Simon, now 89, remembers it being steak tartare. Miles, 82, remembers “steak tartare, coleslaw, potato salad, and cold cuts.”

The provocation for this was that Simon had referred to Miles as “one of New York’s leading party girls and gate-crashers” in a review. “How could I crash anything? I was invited to everything! I was the Gwyneth Paltrow of the day,” Miles has said.

This isn’t true. Miles won two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress that she received for minuscule six and eight minute appearances in the movies Midnight Cowboy and Farewell My Lovely respectively. And she had a role in Andy Warhol’s underground film Heat, a parody of Sunset Boulevard, written and directed by Paul Morissey, where she plays a has-been Hollywood starlet, seduced and used by an LA Hustler.

True to her ‘party girl’ reputation, Miles was seen at so many public events with Warhol and Morissey that ventriloquist and puppeteer Wayland Flowers remarked in one of his shows: “Sylvia Miles and Andy Warhol would attend the opening of a sewer.” Also, that Miles herself would “attend the opening of an envelope”. Flowers used his puppet, ‘Madame’, to express these thoughts, now subsumed in Manhattan lore. Clever way of sidestepping the tartare.

Miles had spoken about Shalimar to Roger Ebert, in between chewing a honey dew slice and lighting a cigarette, at a 1980 LA brunch. Interestingly, she referred to it as the film with Harrison and Saxon without mentioning any of her Indian co-stars, not even the film’s protagonist, or maybe Ebert didn’t care to report that she did. She was in her mid-forties then. She plays a trapeze artist and master thief called Countess Rasmussen. Shah establishes this with a flashback that shows Miles trapeze into a museum, wearing a bright red outfit to steal Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Later, the Countess swings like Tarzan to access windows that seem as if they could simply have been climbed into. For the purpose of knocking out a guard, or avoiding capture, she prefers summersaulting to simple hit and runs (where Dharmendra scores).

The original choice for Miles’ role in Shalimar was Gina Lollobrigida, Italian actress, photojournalist, sculptor and sex symbol of the fifties and sixties. In The Shalimar Adventure, a forgotten 1979 book on the making of the film by publicist Bunny Reuben, a chapter titled The Battle of the Boobs reports a cleavage contest of sorts between Zeenat Aman (in her late twenties) and Lollobrigida (touching fifty at the time) at an early press conference for which the European actress had traveled to India. One doesn’t know what the import of this is. Anyhow, Lollobrigida finally walked out.

The third Shalimar actor from the Hollywood circuit, the now 79 year old John Saxon, is best remembered as Bruce Lee’s comrade-in-arms from Enter The Dragon. Saxon, born Carmine Orrico, was set to be Hollywood’s next big thing when he broke into the movies with meaty roles in Running Wild (he was 20 then) and The Unguarded Moment (21). But this was not to be, and Saxon acted, instead, in innumerable sci-fi, action and horror movies and TV shows. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes for his portrayal of a Mexican bandit in Appaloosa. He played a similar part in Joe Kidd, co-starring with Clint Eastwood and Robert Duvall. Saxon also went on to do Italian spaghetti westerns and police thrillers.

Saxon was just past 40 when he was signed on for Shalimar, though he looks as if he is in his thirties. He plays a master thief called Colonel Columbus.

Dharmendra and Zeenat Aman, both pretty much at the top of their careers, and Shammi Kapoor, the ex-hero who had aged by then and become a prolific supporting actor, made up the Indian end of the cast. Reports say Shah had approached Amitabh Bachchan to play Dharmendra’s part, but the superstar kept delaying things still Shah gave up.

Also, Shalimar had OP Ralhan, the producer-director and sometimes actor behind big Bollywood grossers like Phool Aur Patthar and Talash. Ralhan plays a character named KPW Iyengar, alias ‘Romeo’, a master thief who has robbed the Bank of Singapore. Kapoor’s character, Dr. Dubari, is a thief who poses often as a religious figure, who has stolen St. Timothy’s precious cross from Jerusalem (like the Shalimar ruby itself, this is fictional). He cites religious writing from the faiths to justify crime. Aman plays Sir John’s (Harrison) nurse and Dharmendra’s ex flame.

Shalimar is full of bloopers and irrationalities but then such problems abound in other successful heist films of the yesteryears too, such as Topkapi or The League of Gentlemen. What really does the film in is that it’s overlong, has dully paced scenes and a plot that’s just plain boring: devoid of well-conceived twists and turns and utterly predictable.

It does have some memorable Hindi film music from RD Burman. Hum Bewafa Hargiz Na Thay by Kishore Kumar, for instance, or One, Two Cha Cha Cha—by Usha Uthup—a longish cha-cha-cha number and dance sequence that the film begins with.

There’s also Asha Bhosle’s Mera Pyar Shalimar a title-track that sounds as though it belongs to a Bond film. And like with the Bond movies it should really have been played during the opening credits. Instead, it has been used, wastefully, in sporadic bursts, in laughably futile attempts to drum up pathos or fear.

There is one well-executed sequence in the film: where Dharmendra (Spoiler Alert) paints himself in black and white to blend in with the walls and floor of the hall where the Shalimar ruby lies, as a kind of camouflage. Harrison realizes the big chequered blob inching towards his ruby is Dharmendra upon staring at a chess board with a game they’ve left unfinished. Believe it or not, it’s actually pulled off quite well.

And there is a clever reference. The fictional island, in the Indian Ocean, where the thieves meet is named Saint Dismas, the name assigned to the penitent thief crucified with Jesus Christ, as per the Gospel of Luke.

PART II

Besides these, Shalimar throws up quite a few treasures for lovers of camp. There are Hindi masala film tropes that have been used here like nowhere else. This makes for novel ‘oh-it’s-so-bad-it’s-good’ moments, as opposed to Happy New Year where, for all its eighties Bollywood references, there is mostly only the ‘it’s-so-bad-it’s-bad’. Here are some gems (Many Spoilers Ahead):

Rex Harrison’s voice, in the Hindi version, is dubbed by the one and only Kader Khan— who has penned dialogues for the film as well.

Yes. The same that wrote and said:

“Dukh jab hamaari kahaani sunta hai toh khud dukh ko dukh hota hai.”

A feeble attempt at translation: When sadness hears my tale, then sadness itself feels sad.

And:

“Whiskey mein soda ya pani milane se uska taste kharaab ho jaata hai. Whiskey mein Whiskey milaake peena chahiye.”

Translation: Mixing soda or water with whiskey ruins its taste. One should mix whiskey with whiskey before drinking it.

And:

“Tumhaari yeh baat sunkar mera dil Hyderabad ke tarah aabaad ho gaya.”

Translation: Impossible.

Some perspective. A doyen of eighties Bollywood dialogue writing and delivery, Khan has played a significant part in propagating the ‘angry young man’, Hindi Cinema’s most remembered stereotype, that Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar created for Amitabh Bachchan. Ganga Jamuna Saraswati, Sharaabi, Coolie, Lawaaris, Suhaag, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Amar Akbar Anthony, Mr. Natwarlal, Satte Pe Satta, Hum and Agneepath are some of the famous Bachchan films Khan has written dialogue for.

As an actor, Khan was Prometheus Unbound, set in Hindi film masala. So over the top, even for an industry that routinely demanded a degree of overacting, that he made Dolby Surround seem altogether unnecessary when it came to India. Here, however, the ham extraordinaire displays remarkable restraint, almost as if he wore a horse bit for the dub. Khan’s ‘Sir John voice’ for Harrison is understated and alternates between quietly menacing to a sardonic murmur. To discover this avatar—Kader Khan The Murmurer—can be such a delight for followers of eighties Bollywood that they could watch Shalimar for this reason alone.

I’m not quite sure who dubbed Sylvia Miles’ voice—or whether she did it herself—but she sounds like Helen trying to sound like an Italian trying to speak in Hindi. This is coupled with political incorrectness. In one scene she greets Ralhan with “My Idlee, Dowsaaa!” punctuated by (what else) a summersault.

Two foreign master thieves communicating in Hindi is more than enough, perhaps, so Col. Columbus, John Saxon’s character, is left mute. Saxon speaks in sign language throughout the film and only Dharmendra, or S. S. Kumar, understands sign language. So he translates for others. This raises a question. Dharmendra was never meant to be on the island in the first place. He cheated his way in, taking another invitee’s place. How exactly had the master thieves planned on communicating with Columbus without Dharmendra?

In the latter half Saxon’s character acquires an added shade of complexity. He dies and because the tribals on the island feel they heard him scream after his death they dress up the dead body and worship it as their god. He still doesn’t get any dialogue though.

Let’s address the question of how Dharmendra gatecrashed the gathering. One must give credit where it’s due. Shalimar is possibly the only Hindi movie where Dharmendra doesn’t fool anyone by disguising himself as a Sikh. Yes, he dons a fake beard and moustache and wears a turban, pretending to be the son of Raja Bahadur Singh— yet another master thief who was invited but, sadly, shot before he could make the trip. However, after a day of watching him conspicuously pilfer trinkets from under their eyes everyone bursts into laughter when he claims to be royalty. Why they then allow him to enter the Steal-The-Shalimar Contest, instead of sending him off to be treated for kleptomania, is a mystery. Must be the sign language.

Coming back to voices, when Dharmendra says “Sir John” he sounds either as if he is saying “Mausi (Aunt)” in Sholay or “Kuttay (Dog)” in every other movie. Aman is less versatile. She addresses everyone in that sultry whine she had perfected in her time in Bollywood, a studied mix of complaint and seduction.

Harrison displays so much serenity in the middle of all of this that one wonders whether he was wearing earplugs. There is mild amusement writ on his face, which may have come naturally, and a detachment that makes you suspect he was actually mentally rehearsing lines for the Duke of Norfolk.

The Shalimar ruby itself is assigned an intriguing fictional history. Existing since Vedic times (whenever that may be), it was taken by Alexander and then returned to Chandragupta Maurya by Seleucus I. Then it went missing and was discovered in Srinagar’s Shalimar Gardens by the Mughals. From here it went to the Portuguese and then the English. Then it went missing again. The newspaper clipping that informs us of this is from UK’s Sunday Mirror. The headline reads: “Who Has Plucked The 100 Crore Rupee Plum?”

The “100 Crore Rupee Plum” which actually looks like a snazzy red disco ball that got cut all wrong. This makes for great tragicomedy when juxtaposed with expressions of anguish on the faces of people who die trying to procure it, to the tune of Mera Pyar Shalimar. They don’t look like they’ve lost it because of the stone. They just look mad.

In the end, Dharmendra is a CBI officer. We learn of this because he tells Aman that he had squandered her life’s savings and eloped with some American girl not because he didn’t love her, but because he had to get the Shalimar ruby back for the CBI. He tells her this casually, before saying into the phone purposefully: “This is Agent 3694”.

The tribals under Sir John’s command—he saved 45 of them from death so now they’re his slaves for life—are a cosmopolitan lot. Some of them resemble Africans, some East Asians, and one of them is Mudhu B. Shetty. Shetty, better known as Fight Master Shetty, or, simply, Fighter Shetty—an iconic Hindi film stuntman and action choreographer—would often appear in the action sequences he created as a dark bald hulking goon who would be beaten up by heroes half his size. Here he merely glowers in snatches, in a ridiculous outfit that makes him look like a Red Indian at a fancy dress ball. There is no explanation for this, and viewers unacquainted with the cryptic genre that is the Hindi masala movie may be at a loss as to why, in the middle of so many scenes depicting tribals in ridiculous ways, they are repeatedly confronted with shots of Shetty glaring at them angrily.

Enlightenment arrives at the climax, which comprises a fight between Dharmendra and Shetty who ambushes him—and the audience—with a sword in one hand and a spear in the other. It then dawns that the previous shots were simply Shah’s way of saying: “Here is Shetty. He may be dressed like the next enslaved tribal but wait and see.”

Not that the tribal dress code is uniform— those higher in the hierarchy wear headgear reminiscent of Greek legions while lesser ones wear single feathers. They paint their bodies, light up torches and chant “Jhingalala Hoon Hoon” while marching to nowhere in particular. This makes Dharmendra break into a song, in rhythm with this chant, about his failed relationship with Zeenat Aman.

10.

To be fair, tribals aren’t the only constituency Shalimar offends. If the movie is to be believed, erstwhile rulers of princely kingdoms committing themselves to grand larceny was a worldwide trend in the seventies. Two of five master thieves invited to try and steal the Shalimar—Countess Rasmussen and Raja Bahadur Singh—hail from nobility. And then there’s Sir John. The last government in possession of the Shalimar ruby was supposedly British. Has anyone told Queen Elizabeth II she’s being shown to have knighted someone who ran off with England’s most precious jewel?

Lights! Camera! Everything!

Posted on April 19, 2014 by admin

Zac O’Yeah on how Indian cinema, unlike Western cinema, challenges the idea of genre, and how this can be traced back to the theatrical roots of each.

There’s no doubt about it— Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam (2013), which he wrote, directed, co-produced and starred in, is an out and out action blockbuster on par with the most spectacular Hollywood thrillers of all time. Yet, for the first 41 minutes of its running time of two hours and something, the character Viz, played by the versatile superstar himself, is actually a comic one: a caricatured, cuckolded teacher of Indian dance in America, whose clownish antics have driven his attractive wife, Nirupama (played by model Pooja Kumar), to seek out a therapist and a private eye (specializing in divorce cases), resulting in a series of events that make the couple end up in genuinely unsavoury company.

It’s only in the 42nd minute, as Viz and Nirupama are about to be slaughtered by a group of hardcore terrorists, that he loses his deep cover and reveals his true identity as a virtual one-man army, the toughest bare-hands killing machine in cinema history, disposing of his enemies down to the last man. Nirupama then realizes that her husband is a true hero, and so do we in the audience.

My point is not that Kamal Haasan clowns around a bit in his own movie—his track record includes many hit comedies as well as romantic roles in a very long and distinguished career—but rather that he mixes comedy with thriller, and highly successfully too. So when the silly dance guru cuts off his flowing locks before the bathroom mirror and turns into the powerful superhero, I totally buy it.

And it occurs to me that I’ve rarely seen anything like this in Western cinema. Could it be because comic relief and elements of slapstick are normally expected to defuse whatever suspense a thriller may laboriously be building up? This may explain why humorous elements are treated with utmost care in Hollywood cinema. If a Western movie opened in the manner of Vishwaroopam, it would have stayed there—in comedy land—rather than switching genre midway. But here the switch is made remarkably effortlessly from a domestic comedy of errors to an international high-tension war-zone thriller of terrors, as if the home and the world were but different facets of our complex daily lives.

This is not to say that Western thrillers never have humour in them. Comic effects are frequently used in horror cinema. Shock-slash-guffaw is a thoroughly exploited formula in, for example, the top-grossing Scream franchise, which went on to inspire the early 2000s spoof series Scary Movie. You might recall that Wes Craven’s original Scream (1996) was a spectacularly self-conscious satire on horror genre tropes— starting with that “What’s your favourite scary movie?” quiz which the prank caller subjects Drew Barrymore to before the slashing begins. But the fact remains that most horror movies, through horror history, have taken themselves with deadly seriousness.

As for Hollywood films that blend comedy and crime genres, the only memorable one I can think of is Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), starring comedian Steve Martin as a detective. This is more of a film buff’s film, where Martin (shot in intense black-and-white) interacts with a selection of classic clips from vintage Hollywood noir. There’s no actual suspense, though, and the thrills (and jokes) consist of the juxtaposition of unconnected typical pulp thriller scenes (Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, Bette Davis in Deception, Burt Lancaster in The Killers, Veronica Lake in The Glass Key and fourteen other genre classics) loosely held together by Martin’s private eye navigating through the mix. The whole film is a gag.

Other than that what’s funny about modern Western action? The Indiana Jones flicks were action-packed and occasionally bizarrely funny, granted, but essentially they paid homage to the swashbuckling heroics of 1930s Saturday matinee yarns— so whatever they were, they weren’t comedies. The same goes for Quentin Tarantino’s films. The epic Pulp Fiction (1994) made us see modern Hollywood in a fresh light, but no matter how riddled it is with memorable and macabre gags, it really is a homage to classic gangster pulp. Whatever comic effects Tarantino uses in his films operate to intellectualize the action and make the viewer step back so as to analyze what’s happening on screen.

The truth seems to be that Western action flicks can contain fun sequences but steer clear of out and out comedy. Humour, if incorporated, comes in minimal doses. One of my personal classics is the ski chase in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) when James Bond (Roger Moore) escapes the Soviet agents by jumping off the Alps— in what was, at the time, the most expensive stunt ever filmed. Just as we think this is goodbye to 007, a Union Jack parachute unfurls from his backpack. But even if some critics view the James Bond franchise in its entirety as ridiculous and campy, as in this scene, it wasn’t the intention of the filmmakers to make spy spoof flicks.

It is quite another matter that the James Bond films spawned several genre parodies, perhaps most notably those with Mike Myers’s Austin Powers character (featured in films like The Spy Who Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember), but their action quotient doesn’t count for much if we try to watch them as thrillers.

Another great instance of limited fun that comes to mind is the acerbic wit of Clint Eastwood in the 1970s ‘Dirty Harry’ cop movies (“I know what you’re thinking… Did he fire six shots, or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement… ”) or the low key way in which Eastwood, playing the aged, reformed gunslinger William Munny, falls off his horse in the Academy Award-winning Unforgiven (1992). The grim-jawed one liner cracked by an action hero in the midst of nail-biting drama was developed further in the Die Hard series starring Bruce Willis (starting with Die Hard way back in 1988 and followed by several sequels including A Good Day to Die Hard in 2013), where our streetwise NYPD hero often stops, when the thrills peak, for a fraction of a second, to quip about something— usually along the lines of “this is a bad, bad, bad idea” before he jumps down an elevator shaft or out of the window of a skyscraper. But these are small instances of lightness in essentially dark, violent films, and that’s as much fun as it generally gets in your typical Western action.

Meanwhile, in Indian cinema, broad-spectrum entertainment seems to be what it’s all about. When watching action heroes like Shah Rukh Khan or Sanjay Dutt, I’m usually clinging on to the seat at the end of the show, my heart rate irregular from pumping too much adrenaline, my eyes sore from crying during the sentimental scenes, but also—significantly—my stomach aching from having laughed a lot.

Comedy or suspense? As I look back at a number of favourites from over the decades, films that for one reason or the other have stuck in the mind, I really find it hard to say if I was watching comedies or thrillers.

Yash Chopra’s final epic Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012), for example, is a romantic drama-comedy about the joys and hardships of immigrant life in London, true, but the opening scenes of the film actually show Shah Rukh Khan as the cynical hero in battle fatigues (the character he later becomes after love disappointments): a major portion of the plot is centred around his career as a tough bomb-defusing expert hanging under booby-trapped bridges. Before that there was Delhi Belly (2011)— we may remember it as a disgustingly funny black comedy of unrefined toilet humour, but underpinning it there’s a solid thriller centred around a dangerous smuggled package. A special cinematic treat in the film is Vijay Raaz as a memorably sinister gangster. One of the funniest Wild West farces I’ve seen is Quick Gun Murugan (2009)— which is at the same time a hardboiled gunslinger action with remarkable shootouts, as well as being centred around a vegetarian cowboy (Rajendra Prasad) who tries to stop the creation of the ultimate non-veg dosa. Before that there was Munna Bhai MBBS (2003)— brutal slapstick where a gangster don (Sanjay Dutt) has to redeem himself by going to medical college; come to think of it, Dutt has an unrivalled talent for acting the clown and also the tough guy (rivaled perhaps only by Kamal Haasan, who remade this gangster comedy as Vasool Raja MBBS in the south). A couple of years earlier there was the Kannada hit film Upendra (1999), a violently funny but also intense psychological gangster movie by superstar Upendra who wrote, directed and starred in it. Here the witty actor-director plays the rowdy Naanu who smokes “filter bidis” (bidis tucked into filters torn off cigarettes) and sees the world through “cooling glasses” (shades).

The oldest example I can think of right now is Kundan Shah’s satirical Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)— a goofy comedy about bumbling photo journalists (Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani), but on the other hand a cult detective movie with pretty macabre sequences in which a dead corpse is carted around town.

Although this essay isn’t based on statistical analysis, I’m sure it is possible to come up with many more examples of comic thrillers or thrilling comedies. We laugh our hearts out but enjoy the hard-hitting action, and we’re horrified by the violence. Notably, many of the above actors, although expert comedians, aren’t typecast as comic characters— most of them are equally comfortable doing serious roles. How is this possible?

It is the caricatured dance teacher in Vishwaroopam who might hold a key to unravelling this cinematic mystery. The theatrical emotions that Kamal Haasan plays out in the dance class, taught to him—incidentally—by the Kathak maestro, Birju Maharaj, himself, hint to us that this might be one movie appreciated best if we lean back and think. Hassan’s classical dance moves take us back to the Natya Shastra, the famous, ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts. But what do these more than 2000 year old codifications have to do with 21st century cinema?

From the ancient Indian theory about dance, theatre and music, we learn that any artistic performance must have a dominant mood, a rasa, built out of emotions (bhavas) of which there are eight in number (in addition to which there’s also shanti, or peace, which is the ninth and the opposite of the other eight bhavas). A subtle mixing of the component bhavas, displayed in different segments of the work, serves to create the ultimate rasa or emotional response in the viewer.

One of these components is comedy (hasya), but others include terror or thrills (bhayanaka) and, of course, there’s heroism (vira) and love (rati). Natya Shastra explains in detail how each of these particular emotions is conveyed to the audience.

After the performance, having gone through the emotional turmoil thus produced, the audience experiences shanti or peace, calm, inner purity, insight, which glimpses the truth of life. A performance is judged by its success on this precise count. This very matrix, constructed two millennia before Bollywood was born, can give us a fascinating analytical tool to separate the various elements of a modern Indian film, and understand how components that would oppose each other in Western cinema, actually interlock and produce—through the friction created between opposites—a singular and unique greater experience.

By contrast, Hollywood cinema seems to operate according to the classic strictures of ‘the dramatic unities’ such as they were expounded by ancient art critics starting from the time of Aristotle through to the Renaissance. In about 17th century Europe, this resulted in an extreme purism in the interest of creating a semblance of credibility, particularly strongly expressed in French classicism which rejected all hybrid art forms, such as tragicomedy for example. In the olden days a staged play therefore had to confine itself within a rigorously delineated timeframe, social circumstance, and so on. Although modern cinema isn’t bound by these traditional unities, there remains in Hollywood filmmaking that same strong sense of a formal unity of plot with a single, central, pivotal action at its base: hence an action flick is a thriller and not a comedy, and vice versa. Incredible as it may sound, this tendency, that can be traced back to the 3rd century B. C. philosopher Aristotle, remains very much alive today. Check out Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut, the iconic Reservoir Dogs (1992) or the more mainstream, claustrophobic David Fincher thriller Panic Room (2002) starring Jodie Foster for extreme cases of adherence to these dramatic unities.

These tendencies that I’m discussing here aren’t absolute or exclusive, of course. There are also clear parallels between Indian and Western films— both types of cinema aim at taking us through classic cathartic experiences, for one. Hollywood and Indian cinema have influenced each other through the years, and there are many Indian films that are rather Western in their expression.

All the same, the hallmark of the Western tradition is that it tends to focus on a single emotion, whereas the Indian tradition not only has space for many more bhavas, but we expect this particular quality from the films— they must operate on all possible emotional levels, speak to the whole body, the brain, the heart, the guts, the groin, as well as the funny bone.

Like life itself, the Indian hero (and the heroine too) is complex: consisting of one part heroics, one part love, one part comedy, and so on. We in the audience are all smaller versions of our multi-tasking heroes. Paradoxically, the Western cinema’s attempt at achieving lifelikeness through its dramatic unities and purer realism may to some extent actually be less close to the viewer’s real life.

So, therefore, a typical Indian film contains, within itself, the elements of every other cinematic genre: a romantic movie will also have a villain who plots to do nefarious mischief as well as a clown who makes us laugh until we cry. A comedy is also likely to have heroics of the nail-biting kind, as well as a romantic element which will bring tears to our eyes. And the action film, too, will have serious comic elements in it, the latter seeming to enhance the thrills rather than defusing them— as we Indian cinema-goers very well know. If a Western film attempts the same, critics and audiences are likely to judge it as being all over the place; it is impossible to imagine Sylvester Stallone sing, dance and horse around on a mountain slope, and then go on a shooting spree. But this same impossibility is not only possible in India, it is the prerequisite of any really great movie.