A passionate advocacy of Hindi cinema

Most journalists tracking the media and entertainment industry will find Anil Saari’s Hindi Cinema: An Insider’s View lucid in its approach. The book is essentially a collection of essays and articles that were published by the late Saari in leading newspapers of India and also — some now defunct — magazines. Published after Saari’s untimely death in 2005, the book is endearing because it conveys the thoughts of one of the senior-most film critics of India. Because of the sheer academic stance that the book takes, Hindi Cinema may not be everyone’s cup of cinnamon or green tea. Simply put, it’s kadak (strong) in its content, very exhaustive in its research and despite being an “insider’s view” comes sans the glamour quotient that usually comes attached and is so typically identified with our Hindi cinema.

In other words, Saari’s book may not qualify as the best in terms of its writing (the chapter “Rags to Riches Stories Made Real”, for example, made me yawn) but rarely misses the mark in conveying the author’s myriad thoughts on Hindi films. Also, since there aren’t as many academic books as there should be on Indian films, Hindi Cinema will, at least, manage to generate the right interest in select media circles. In fact, I met film director Deepa Mehta with my copy of the book recently and she instantly jotted down the name promising to buy the book too.

The strength of Hindi Cinema lies in the fact that it takes the courage to print articles and essays of a journalist who clearly wrote with a purpose of understanding Indian cinema, and most importantly, enjoyed all that it offered to him as an audience member. A self-confessed Guru Dutt fan (“A Chela Salutes Guru Dutt” is also published under the subhead “The Makers of Popular Cinema” in the book), Saari, in almost all the writings published here, studies the framework of films, contextualising them with the socio-economic changes witnessed in the country. What’s more, through his writings, he often wonders — and comes away fully convinced — about the philosophical layers that lie beneath all the glitz that Hindi films offer. A case in point: Saari’s study of Pyaasa’s iconic song ‘Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaye toh kya hai? (Even if you get the entire world, so what?),’ that according to the author, “… is a song whose emotional soul goes back… to Kabir and the poetry of the Bhakti movement; and to the essence of the Indian approach to the illusory world of maya”.

The manner in which Saari studied films for his work and the fascinating reports of the sets, shooting locales and filming schedules that he weaved into his work — some of which has been published in Hindi Cinema — is a treat. What’s more, it comes alive in the cinema that we witness today. Also, it’s a rare glimpse into the Mumbai film nagri and how it operated then, and how it functions today.

One of my favourite essays in the book is “Architecture of Illusion”, published in 1994 in one of the national dailies where Saari worked. While he’s written about the contribution of art directors in Hindi films, he also talks about his experience, on the “breathtaking set of architectural magnificence” created for what would later be one of the biggest debacles of Hindi cinema — Rajkumar, a film starring Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor, produced by Tutu Sharma. The lofty claims of what the film aspired to be “… a story of two warring princely families, in the tradition of Rajasthani folklore” —as Vinay Shukla, the writer explained it back then — saw even a BBC unit on the sets where “7,000 wooden planks… the Greco-Russian pillars with Egyptian-style hieroglyphs… shall all disappear into dust” after 30-odd days, once the shooting was over.

Divided into four sections, Hindi Cinema presents a collection of 35 articles that are slotted in four main sections: “The Aesthetic Foundations of the Hindi Formula Film”, “Themes and Variations of Indian Cinema”, “Perspectives on Indian Cinema” and “Makers of Popular Cinema”.

One wishes, after going through the book, if only a conversation with Saari was possible. Hindi Cinema: An Insider’s View is a dialogue that begins well and one feels the need to extend it. But maybe that’s why we’ve been left with such an enriching book.

HINDI CINEMA
AN INSIDER’S VIEW

Anil Saari
Oxford University Press
Rs 495; Pages: vi + 222