Indian audiences have been able to see the myriad colours of their country reflected on the big screen this year. Phillauri captured a new Punjab in all its glory while Mukti Bhawan did the same for Benares. Jolly LLB 2 shed a different light on Lucknow and Hindi Medium on Delhi. The latest film to enter these ranks is Bareilly Ki Barfi. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, the filmmaker behind Bareilly, made her directorial debut with Nil Battey Sannata which was set in Agra. The Mumbai-born Tiwari has twice now chosen to set her films in small-town UP. The same UP whose denizens are mocked as bhaiyas in urban, hip Mumbai.
The frequency with which city-bred filmmakers seem to be turning to small-town India in search of a subject is enough to be termed a phenomenon. It seems increasingly obvious that these spaces, hitherto neglected in cinema, are positively bursting with stories that need to be told.
Let us now take a look at the ten highest grossing films at the box office so far this year: Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, Raees, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Tubelight, Kaabil, Jolly LLB 2, Badrinath Ki Dulhaniya, Jab Harry Met Sejal, Hindi Medium, and Half Girlfriend.
Only one of these, Jab Harry Met Sejal, is set in foreign tourist destinations. Badrinath Ki Dulhaniya does travel to Singapore for a bit but it is firmly rooted in Jhansi. The rest of them are set in various parts of India. This trend clearly shows that even when our films are not taking us on a trip to Paris or London, they are smash hits.
The situation was quite different only a few years ago. Mainstream Hindi fare seemed to cater to an entirely different sort of India then. Karan Johar’s films, for example, do not seem to be made for a third world audience at all.
From Abbas-Mastan to Anees Bazmi, all of them seem to be entirely disconnected from the grassroots realities of India. Some niche productions do gather the courage to tell radically different stories but these rarely stand a chance against mass-market behemoths. Yet, out of these shadows emerged auteurs like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Gautam Ghosh, and Utpalendu Chakrabarty.
At long last, Bollywood is turning its gaze away from gilded mirages and towards real stories of real India. What’s more, some of these films are finding a large audience and laughing all the way to the bank which certainly augurs well for the future of such cinema.
Readers might remember a small Rajat Kapoor starrer by the name of Aankhon Dekhi that came out a few years ago. Set in an Old Delhi neighbourhood, this was the story of an ordinary man. This is the film that helped Ghanshyam Films gain a foothold in Bollywood.
Their next film was Masaan, which also marked the debut of director Neeraj Ghaywan. It featured a beautiful love story set in Benares’ Manikarnika Ghat. It ended up winning two awards at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
Filmmakers who set their stories in small town India, particularly the Hindi belt, manage to evoke related pathos even when their films leave these geographical terrains for fancier shores. Consider Vikas Bahl’s Queen. The story of a Rajouri girl’s first trip to Paris, the film explored the sheltered townie/big city divide like no other.
Within this new cinematic vision of India, even Mumbai is being recast on screen. In 1992, Sudhir Mishra attempted to represent a different side of Mumbai by turning his camera on the slums of Dharavi but he found no takers. Perhaps audiences then were simply not ready.
In 2002, Slumdog Millionaire did much the same, albeit with diametrically different results. Before this, Mumbai had played host chiefly to stories of crime and romance. Here, it is imperative to mention two of Hansal Mehta’s films that captured the daily tragedies of this mega metropolis, and the illusory nature of justice. These films are City Lights and Shahid.
We can now claim that contemporary films represent the truth of our cities and our lived experiences. It is the duty of every artist, across art forms, to try and depict the truth of their times. Other art forms do not have obscene amounts of money at stake, which is perhaps why they tend to perform this duty better. Or maybe filmmakers believe that since audiences shirk their own duty by seeking out brainless entertainment, they are absolved of theirs too.
Hindi cinema has been mired in the muck of pulp fiction and related elements for too long. For the longest time, it was widely assumed that the average Indian theatre-goer only wanted superficial fare. But this new crop of filmmakers has destroyed that notion.
While we are on the subject, we should also briefly discuss the way regional languages are treated in Hindi cinema. Once upon a time, Mahmood infused his Southern-ness into his Hindi productions, while Asit Sen brought along with him a distinct Bengali flavour. Amitabh Bachchan brought a uniquely UP-ish brand of Hindi alive on the screen. But these instances were few and far between; for the most part, regional languages were a source of comedy in Bollywood.
Enter Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur and Anand L Rai’s Tannu Weds Manu Returns. Both films feature characters that brought local dialects alive onscreen with so much swag that mockery on the part of the audience, no matter how urbane and sophisticated, was out of the question. I myself tried to retain the naturalness of regional language in my film Anarkali of Arrah. Characters from UP-Bihar or Haryana can simply not be made to speak the Hindi of Bhopal and Meerut without sacrificing all realism and nuance.
This doesn’t mean that regional languages don’t get short shrift in mainstream fare anymore. Take the example of Aamir Khan’s PK. However, film critics now pay special attention to a film’s linguistic realism which is perhaps one of the reasons why more directors have started doing the same.
Region-specific character portrayals also suffer the same bias in Bollywood. People from the area in Bihar that I belong to often ask me if violence is all that Bihar has to offer. I have no answer to give to them at times like these. If one were to go by Prakash Jha’s negative portrayal of the state in his film series, one would be forced to answer yes. E Niwas, who made Shool in 199, portrayed Bihar in a similar manner, as a space of relentless nightmarish violence. Uttar Pradesh received the same cinematic treatment before that.
In the last few years, however, the relationship between Hindi films and Uttar Pradesh has undergone a change. A major factor behind this is the policy adopted by the UP government, which has taken several steps to make their state an attractive location for film production. Jharkhand too has recently adopted a similar policy. We may expect stories set in this hitherto unexplored region on the silver screen in the near future.
Thanks to the internet, we truly do seem to have the entire world at our fingertips. This is why our films need to turn their enamoured gazes away from foreign locales to unmapped domestic terrain instead. All the untold stories are in here.
(Avinash Das is a journalist and ‘Anaarkali Of Aarah’ was his second stint as director. This article has been translated from Quint Hindi .)
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