The 1991 Economic Reforms Created an Unlikely Hero - Ajay Devgn

It’s 25 years since Ajay Devgn debuted with ‘Phool Aur Kaante’, a look at his unusual success.

Released just a few months after then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao's iconic 1991 economic reforms Phool Aur Kaante (1991) was the debut of a most unlikely hero. Blessed with traditionally unconventional looks, Ajay Devgan (that is how he spelt his name back then) and his choice of a vendetta film where the hero transforms from a college student to a gang lord and also from a lover boy to a father were both instantly written off.

Although the 1991 economic reforms cannot be directly linked to the emergence of Ajay Devgan, and later Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty, Shah Rukh Khan, and also, to a great extent the second innings of both Govinda and Sunny Deol, it played a great role in creating a new audience that contributed significantly to these developments.

The 1991 reforms transformed both the economy as well as the consumer and when it came to culture and films it opened up the vistas where access to entertainment from the rest of the world became easy. If a major segment of the audience was gravitating towards globalized entertainment, a segment here began to emerge that was previously not targeted. This was the audience that had previously been discarded as ‘B’ or ‘C’ centers in the parlance of film distributors.

Devgan was not the kind of material that was seen as someone which could rock the market. Moreover, Devgan was not a 'star son' in the truest sense of the word, his father was an immensely popular action director, Veeru Devgan, and the film released on the same day, 22 November 1991, as Yash Chopra's opus Lamhe (1991). But what followed was totally unexpected - Lamhe was a commercial washout while Phool Aur Kaante went in to become one of the biggest hits of the year and Devgan, an unlikely star.

There were many factors that contributed to the success of Phool Aur Kaante - the music by Nadeem-Shravan topped the charts, the action where Devgan was introduced doing a split on two moving motorbikes, the screenplay that broke away from an onslaught of the lover next door genre made popular by the two Khans- Aamir and Salman post-Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) and Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) respectively, the need for a new star in the mould of Amitabh Bachchan when the obvious replacements like Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt and Sunny Deol started to look lost, etc.

But the one factor that often goes unnoticed when it comes to acknowledging the elements that might have helped in making both Phool Aur Kaante, and by extension, Ajay Devgan, a success is the arrival of the new group of audience that came into its own. This is also the audience that made Nadeem-Shravan the biggest music composers of the 1990s, Gulshan Kumar’s T-Series and Ramesh Taurani’s Tips music companies giants.

In the initial years of the economic liberalization, the class disparity was not so prominent and this showed the way Indian audiences lapped up films. Between 1991 and 1997 popular Hindi films were hardly targeted to a particular audience. This could probably be a reason why one would see an Akshay Kumar or composers such as Dilip Sen- Sameer Sen being a part of films produced by Yash Chopra or Shah Rukh Khan films being produced by those who would not be considered ‘A-list' by today’s standards. This was also the period where Ajay Devgan and Akshay Kumar became big draws like Govinda and Sunny Deol.

Half a decade since 1991 reforms the distinction between groups of audience based on their economic condition became more prominent. Beginning with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1991) Hindi cinema had started to exist in two clear camps - one being the über cool, the ultra chic and the other being everything else. By the time Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) happened, the disparity became clearer and almost a class thing. The people shown in these films were not ‘real’ and seemed to live lives that were aspirational. This, too, was an aftereffect of the 1991 economic reforms where a sharp increase in Indians traveling abroad for work or leisure exposed them to the world had begun to reflect in films.

Also, a premium was being attached to the products of the big names - Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’s music was released on Sony music, which was priced a tad higher than the Tips, the Venus or the Westons of the day. The result - one segment happily paid something extra for a Karan Johar or an Aditya Chopra product in order to appear with the times while the other proudly continued to flaunt their love for what the former termed ‘massy.’

The latter was also the same audience that gravitated towards films made by a particular bunch of filmmakers primarily Mukesh and Mahesh Bhatt. Some of them might have shifted towards the other lot with the passage of time but a major chunk of this still continues to exist beyond the universe of the Farhan Akhtars, the Adi Chopras, the Karan Johars. The sheer power of this audience is what makes a Shah Rukh Khan do a Dilwale (2015) or the upcoming Raaes. It's this audience that has made a certain kind of mass appeal alluring enough for a Salman Khan to repeatedly do a Wanted, a Dabangg and a Sultan or a Ranbir Kapoor to attempt a Besharam.

The manner in which the acceptance of this mass base has come to matter can be seen in the reaction to Ranveer Singh's debut Band Baaja Baaraat (2010). The initial response of the viewer to Ranveer Singh especially when the first visuals of the song, Ainvayi Ainvayi... appeared, mirrored to the ones that had initially greeted Ajay Devgn when the world first saw him perched on top of two moving bikes. No one gave them half a shot at success. In fact, many even questioned the logic behind the film, some even Aditya Chopra's acumen. But the manner in which Ranveer became a rage post-Band Baaja Baaraat reveals how the demography of viewer had changed.

The audience that loved Ajay Devgan when he first appeared still exists and likes him as much. The only difference the last twenty-five years have made is that the real McCoy needs to pretend to be cool by being someone else while the ‘other’ imitates them and becomes cool.

(Gautam Chintamani is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (2014) and was on National Film Awards jury for Best Writing on Cinema in 2016.)