In Bollywood even the self-destructive gangsters, the scorned alcoholic poets, and the lone wolf cops have a "Ma" waiting patiently at home, eyes overflowing with tears of loving concern. In fact the ubiquity and the sheer numbers of supporting-cast family members gumming up the works is one of the first oddities a newcomer is likely to notice upon diving into Hindi movies: These include everything from "lost and found" brothers on opposite sides of the law to comic-relief fat uncles and stick-in-the-mud parents who don't approve to the Hindu hero's relationship with a Muslim girl. Multiple subplots about family members appear to be de rigueur conventional elements that have to be dutifully worked through in every movie, or to the home audience the story will feel incomplete, only half-told. An Indian cultural historian, Vinay Lal, has even written an essay entitled "The Impossibility of the Outsider in the Modern Hindi Film."
Bollywood's biggest hits of the 1990s were lavish musical fantasias on the intimately related themes of romance and family obligation, with Sooraj Barjatya's Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (What Am I to You?, '94) and Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-Heart Will Carry Off the Bride, '95) setting new high-water marks at the Indian box office. These glossy filmi operettas broke new ground thematically in at least one respect: They insisted self-consciously on bedrock conventions of Hindi cinema that in the past would have been comfortably taken for granted. A succinct explanation of the shift that had occurred is offered by screenwriter-turned-lyricist Javed Akhtar, who helped create the "angry young man" persona of Amitabh Bachchan in the action scripts he co-wrote for Zanjeer (Chains, '73) and Dewaar (The Wall, '75), and who regards the movies of the so-called Hindu Family Values school as the first "really new formula" to emerge in Hindi cinema since the '70s. In an interview with Nasreen Munni Kabir, published in her book Talking Films (Oxford India, '00), Akhtar describes an "onslaught of consumerism" that in the 1990s "brought Indian society to the point where we are feeling slightly lost. We talk of a cultural invasion, an excess of Westernization, of a loss of family values ... But on the other hand, what's the alternative? Do I go back to the village? Western culture and glitter are very attractive. So [Sooraj Barjatya's] Maine Pyar Kiya [I Love Someone,'89] and Aapke Hain Koun...! ['94] offer the solution: a happy marriage between the two worlds. I can have everything offered by modernization and still hold on to family values and tradition."
The popularity of the most successful Hindu Family Values films was cult-like in India and among nostalgic NRIs abroad, with fans returning to see them again and again, reciting the familiar dialog in unison, like Rocky Horror devotees. This in spite of the fact that the movies amounted to a propaganda campaign for a social institution that many in the audience probably had no use for in their own lives. This is the beleaguered instition known as the Hindu Joint Family, in which all the sons continue to live in their father's house with their wives and children---"usually in separate rooms," according to one deadpan account.
The HFV movies gloss over the likely aggravations of such a set-up, in the first instance by focusing on fabulously rich families whose over-decorated palaces are so spacious that nobody's style is ever cramped. There are always gangs of servants around for to wrangle the demeaning chores that householders traditionally go to war over, like hanging up the wet towels. The swooning dream of fabulous wealth is surely an additional factor in the broad appeal of these movies, along with their amniotic visions of domestic coziness.
Of all these pictures, the one that seems most likely to last is Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, which is some kind of weird candy-colored masterpiece, an alternate-universe fantasy as richly detailed and as internally constant as classic science fiction. Admittedly, some spoilsports, even in India, have expressed an intense temperamental aversion to these movies, and to HAHK in partuicular. One home court critic observed that "in the peppermint-sweet paradise created by writer-director Sooraj R. Barjatya, guys and dolls keep smiling till you wonder if Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! is the world's longest toothpaste ad." (It has also been described as a "three hour wedding video.") I think the term "operetta," which I've borrowed from Kevin Thomas' Los Angeles Times review of Maine Pyar Kiya, goes a long way toward explaining the modus operandi of this ingratiating sub-genre, in which complex production numbers are crafted from parlor games like "Pass the Pillow" and "Hide the Shoes," and in which entire plots can pivot upon the miraculous interventions of household pets that get zapped with bolts of celestial lightening by the blue-skinned avatar of Vishnu.[1]
Quite a few of the Golden Age of Bollywood classics, in which song sequences function as integral narrative elements, are really "music dramas"---"melodramas" in the original sense of the term---rather than Broadway or Hollywood-style musicals. In Sooraj Barjatya's movies, though, the narrative situations are often much less significant than the musical outbursts they release or inspire. Where the standard song count in Hindi cinema is five or six per film, Barjatya packs fourteen catchy tunes into Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! alone. A couple of these numbers, like the party-game set piece "Joote De Do" ("Give Us The Shoes"), which are cooked up out of almost nothing, are among the high-stepping musical high points of recent Hindi cinema. Sequences in which the characters are motionless, in which the people are talking rather than dancing or singing, are the ones that feel anomalous here. So this isn't a case in which the songs are carried or justified by the narrative: It's more like the other way around. The movie's central thematic issues are actually worked out not in the dialog but in the song lyrics. This creates some obvious frustrations for the firangs in the audience, not least because on both available DVD versions of the movie only the dialog is subtitled. (We can appreciate the difficulty. A line in Hindi like "Didi tera dewar diwana" has a lot more alliterative oomph than its precise English equivalent: "Elder sister, the youngest brother of your husband is insane.")
The writer-director of Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, Sooraj Barjatya, got into movies the old-fashioned Indian way, by joining the family business. His grandfather, the late Tarachand Barjatya, founded Rajshri Productions (P) Ltd. as a distribution company in 1942. His first triumph was the all-India release of the Tamil swashbuckler Chandralekha ('48). Tarachand branched out into production only in the early 1960s. Rajshri proudly bills itself today as "India's Largest Entertainment Conglomerate," It has also been referred to as "the desi Disney," because it has always specialized in wholesome family movies set in fresh-scrubbed back-lot villages. But in the blood-soaked Bachchan era the Rajshri style began to look wincingly out of date, and its box office fortunes declined. It was Tarachand's grandson Sooraj who turned things around with Maine Pyar Kiya, picking up on a new wave of youth-oriented romantic films and adapting it to the house style. "If you look at the Rajshri repertoire," Sooraj has said, "you will find that my films only continue that tradition of family drama. The only additions to the cause have been a certain polish and sophistication in the presentation." (Barjatya is too modest here: With its gum-ball visuals and glossy film style, Maine Pyar Kiya is world-class eye candy. The film is widely seen as having spearheaded a push for improved technical standards that changed the look of Hindi cinema in the '90s.)
The cycle of doomed-young-love movies was launched in 1988 with Mansoor Khan's hugely successful Romeo and Juliet re-vamp Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From Doomsday To Doomsday, '88), the film that made overnight stars of Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla. In QSQT, however, the clannish Joint Family system is explicitly presented as savage and repressive, a literally feudal holdover addicted to Sicilian-style tragic blood feuds. In MPK, which was released just a year later, the same system is seen as benign almost to a fault. After a brief interlude of idealistic rebellion that can be written off as a "growth experience," the defiant young lovers of MPK (Salman Khan and Bhagyashree) are welcomed back into the nest with open arms. In retrospect, MPK looks like a deliberate effort at co-option, clamping the lid down upon the insurgent energies unleashed by QSQT. While Mansoor Khan is playing the familiar commercial game of pandering to youthful feelings of self-pity and injustice, Sooraj Barjatya seems to have bigger fish to fry: he is aiming at nothing less than salvaging the damaged reputation of the Joint Family system itself.
Barjatya's second film, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, actually borrowed its premise from one of those early, Disney-ish Rajshri productions, Govind Moonis' modestly successful village romance Nadiya Ki Paar (Evening of a Daughter's Child, '82), in which a young girl's arranged engagement to her late sister's bereaved husband is complicated by the fact that she has fallen in love with his kid brother. The choice of subject matter was deliberate, and one Indian critic had no doubt about what HAHK represented in the 90s: "nostalgia for small town India and its family celebrations, now devoured completely by metropolitan India." A strange observation on the face of it, since none of the movie's action unfolds either in a city or even in a small town. Geographically the film is suspended awkwardly somewhere between the countryside and the metropolis. The palatial havelis of its two central families are widely separated country estates connected by highways winding through leafy-green landscapes decorated with beaming peasants who serve as background dancers in an al fresco production number.[2]
But the village continues to make its presence felt in Barjatya's films, as an off-screen touchstone of "authenticity." This is particularly clear in his bloated HAHK follow-up, Hum Saath-Saath Hain (We Stand United, '99). The movie's industrialist hero, Ramkishenji (Alok Nath), left his childhood village to make his fortune, but he has returned in middle age to build his dream palace on the outskirts, the most excessive castle of fantasy in any Rajshri production. (The interior decor is a riot of multi-colored pastels, like a bowlful of butter mints.) As rich as he is, Ramkishenji remains a countryman at heart: it's a fond joke in the family that he still isn't comfortable eating with a knife and fork. Some critics have suggested that in the later "NRI returned" films, like DDLJ, authentic Indian-ness is divisively equated with the practices of the Hindu middle-class, with a way of life that encompasses both Joint Family togetherness and devout religious Hinduism. Barjatya seems to be peddling a much more basic, salt-of-the-earth notion of authenticity: "We may look like city slickers but we still have honest rural soil under our fingernails."
Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! has been described as an almost plotless movie, as if there was really nothing more to it than a series of boisterous Punjabi family gatherings set to music. But I suspect that the movie will feel uneventful only to people for whom the normal passages of domestic life (engagements, weddings, baby showers) are either inherently tedious or eye-rollingly uncool. The instigating circumstance here is the marriage that has been arranged between Pooja (Renuka Shahane), the eldest daughter of an owlish Sanskrit scholar, and Rajesh (Mohnish Bahl), the elder ward of an unmarried rich industrialist. Decades earlier, we learn, the industrialist, Kailash Nath (Alok Nath), set aside his own dreams of fatherhood out of a sense of family duty, to raise his two orphaned nephews, Rajesh and Prem (the ubiquitous Salman Khan). At the simplest level HAHK is a romantic coming-of-age story, circling around the younger siblings of the newlyweds, Rajesh's brother Prem and Pooja's sister Nisha (Madhuri Dixit), as they circle around each other, and charting their transition to adulthood.
Salman Khan has become such annoying performer in his recent movies--preening and smug and chronically shirtless, as if the washboard abs could compensate for the receding hairline--that the relative freshness of his work in HAHK may take some getting used to. The boyish mannerisms that he's still trading on look more-or-less spontaneous here, and even his inelegant athleticism in the dance numbers seems to fit the awkward transitional phase his character is going through, as a near-adult who has only a prankish adolescent role to play in the festivities. And while Madhuri Dixit may already have been a few years too old to be playing Nisha (who should look about nineteen), she is a world-class suggestive flirt, and in her scenes with Khan she conveys Nisha's wide-eyed delight at her own quickening pulse rate.
Prem and Nisha are introduced as the senior representatives of the younger generations in their respective households, as ringleaders of the kid contingent who strategize elaborate pranks and party games. But Prem is also a recent MBA graduate, already being groomed to follow his older brother into their uncle's (vaguely defined) business. And in a song sequence cut from some prints of the film (and from one of the two extant DVD versions), "Chocolate, Lime Juice," Nisha looks around at the childish trappings in the room she has occupied as the pampered princess in her father's house and realizes that she does not belong there anymore: "Ab mujhe lagti hain sari paheliyan, yeh kaun - sa mod hai umra ka?" ("These all seem to me like things of the past. At which turn in the road do I find myself now?")
If the movie is about anything at all (and honest people differ) it is the complicated readjustments, especially of terminology, that accompany any shift of relative position within the intricate hierarchy of the Joint Family. The Hindi language itself gives HAHK's lyricist, Ravinder Rawel, a leg up in this regard: by some accounts it has seventy unique terms for family relationships, almost as many as the Inuit supposedly have for snow. A great deal can be conveyed with just a few of these words, as when Pooja, addressing her new baby, sings "Muna ye teri chachaji, ban-na chehe mausaji:" "Your chacha (your father's younger brother, namely Prem) wants to become you mausaji (your mother's sister's, which is to say Nisha's, husband)." In his exuberant opening number, "Wah Wah Ramji" ("Hail, Hail Lord Rama"), Prem accomplishes two things at once: he celebrates his brother's engagement, and he embraces cheerfully his new relationship with the bride to be. This entails his graduation to the storied role of the devar (younger brother-in-law), who is expected to act as an in-house friend and advisor to the family's new bhabi, or senior sister-in-law. Prem wears his responsibilities lightly, however, mischievously alerting Pooja to Rajesh's supposed character flaws: "Mere bhaiya jo chup baithan hai, dekho bhabi kaise aithen hai" ("My older brother who sits there so quietly, see bhabi how at times he gets provoked.") A few scenes later, Pooja returns the compliment, referring to Prem as "my divine helper like Krishna."[3]
All of the relationships that are handled with a light, blithe touch in Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! could also be portrayed as fraught and volatile. Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, in his book Intimate Relations: Exploring India Sexuality (Penguin,'90) suggests that in an Undivided Household a woman who feels abandoned by her husband has no choice but to "seek another object within the family. Traditionally, this object has often been the husband's younger brother. ... Expressed in a certain tenderness, in erotically tinged banter, or cases of actual physical intimacy, the relationship is very much a part of a marriage's emotional space." In HAHK, though, the devar/bhabi relationship is carefully defused in advance, when an instant spark of attraction is established between Prem and his bhabi's sister Nisha. Something more problematic seems about at least once, when, during a fiercely competitive round of "Pass the Pillow," Rajesh blurts out (in spoken verse) a fairly startling observation: "A sister-in-law is half a wife." But this turns out to be a familiar piece of racy folk wisdom, and its pay off is heavily ironic: The consensus of family opinion that forms quickly after Pooja's sudden death that Nisha would be the perfect person to take her sister's place as Rajesh's second wife.
Still, Kakar's description fits the tone of all the in-law relationships in HAHK remarkably well. Even the parental in-laws, the samdhins, find themselves from time to time in seemingly playful situations in which unspoken "illicit" impulses can be allowed to surface without reproach. In the wonderful song sequence "Aaj Hamare Dil Mein" ("My Heart is Confused Today") Kailash Nath reveals, with the active encouragement of Pooja and Nisha's father, Prof. Siddarth Choudhury (Anupam Kher), that when the two men were hot-blooded college boys together Nash, too, was a suitor for the hand of Kamla (Reema Lagoo), Choudhury's radiant wife. The framing of the song at a semi-formal "get acquainted" summit meeting between the families suggests that a blameless friendly relationship is being caricatured for effect, just to heighten its entertainment value. (At one point Choudhury indicates with a dance step that he has been outfitted with a set of horns, a move that would surely be unthinkable if there was any real basis for it.) But as the song continues a sense of repressed nervous excitement unexpectedly begins to build. The tune (by the team of music directors known as Raam-Laxman) has a subtle rhythmic hiccup on the first lines of the refrain, "Raaz ki baat bataan" ("Let me tell you a secret"), as if Kailash Nath has to swallow hard before continuing. It is even implied (or is it we who infer?) that he has remained single into middle age not only because he was too busy raising his nephews but because he never found anyone to replace Kamla in his heart. When Kailash and Kamla exchange a melting glance and a heartfelt namaste at the end of the number we are left with a question: is there more to the playful affection expressed in the song than even Prof. Choudhury realizes?
In this instance, and in many others, the situation is saved by the sheer inexhaustible niceness of all the characters. In fact, one of the great innovations of Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, was that, as Barjatya has said, "There was no place in it for the addition of a defined villain. Circumstances and fate are the villains here." After Maine Pyar Kiya, which still paid lip service to the convention, Barjatya has omitted even the figure who has become the functional equivalent of the bad guy in many other Hindu Family Values films: the rigidly traditional father. Since his appearance as Baldev Singh in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995, the imposing character actor Amrish Puri (best known in the West as the blood-thirsty jungle cult leader in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on these roles.[4]
Barjatya allows potentially disruptive forces to surface in HAHK, but in such a measured way that they can be vented harmlessly, like so much noxious gas. The only real note of negativity is sounded by the snide devil's advocate figure known as Baguvanti (Bindhu), an overdressed childless aunt in Nath's extended family. Baguvanti seems to have been created to anticipate every objection that could possibly occur to the cynics in the audience, arguing that financial self-interest is the only sensible reason for engineering a marriage, that all servants are schemers who should be kept in their place, that babies are no big deal, and that they can be looked after just as efficiently by ayahs (nannies) as by members of their own family. For this heresy she earns a crowd-pleasing third-act slap from her long-suffering milquetoast husband. [5]
The acting style that Barjatya enforces is HAHK is unsubtle, to put it mildly; expressions are flash frozen and displayed to the audience. But this is a conscious stylistic choice, not a symptom of incompetence, a variation on the declamatory "actorly" mode of performance that Bollywood has traditionally favored. And even provincial Westerners who reflexively prefer "realism" will be bound to admit that in this case it has been very smoothly orchestrated. There is a moment near the end of "Joote De Do," when Prem finally takes possession of the contested shoes and then voluntarily hands them over to Nisha, a spontaneous gesture of affection that surprises even him, when all the synchronized heavy lifting pays off in a moment of startling purity. If your pulse rate doesn't quicken, too, the Hindu Family Values films are probably not for you.
The trend seems to be waning anyway. Tired late entries such as Sunil Darshan's Ek Rishtaa (A Relationship, '01) and Karan Johar's gorgeously upholstered Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happy Sometimes Sad, '01) look like force-of-habits hits that very few people are passionate about. The grass roots crowd-pleasers in India recently have been violent "patriotic" action pictures like Anil Sharma's Gadar-Ek Prem Kata [Rebellion-A Love Story, '01], a handsomely mounted Sunny Deol Pak-basher. The HFV canon appears to be a closed book, and Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! is so much more seamlessly effective than any of the others that we should probably think of it as a fluke classic, in which all of the defining elements--the fixed structures of the Joint Family system, the cyclical regularity of a series of rituals and celebrations, the formalism of the musical comedy/operetta format, and the resources of a language that makes it possible to name precisely almost any shift and permutation of relationships--just fell magically into place. [6]
We may begin to get an overwhelming sense that these are people who tend to define their "true selves" not in isolation but in relationship to other people. There is a blunt statement of this view in a "country study" prepared in 1997 by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress: "One of the great themes pervading Indian life is social interdependence. People are born into groups--families, clans, sub castes, castes, and religious communities--and live with a constant sense of being part of and inseparable from these groups. A corollary is the notion that everything a person does properly involves interaction with other people. A person's greatest dread, perhaps, is the possibility of being left alone, without social support, to face the necessary challenges of life." (Vinay Lal, in his essay on the Outsider, sharply questions such textbook "Indological" accounts. "The tyranny of the sociological method," he suggests, "would make a complex civilization hostage to the categories of an impoverished social science.")
But a preference for individualism, like a taste for cinematic realism, can be difficult habit to shake off once acquired, even if it has been stigmatized as yet another decadent import from the godless West. A lot of people have been returning to India from the other hemisphere in recent years, with foreign clothes and hair styles, and foreign attitudes, a well, and quite a few of their countrymen have developed a sense of these things while watching satellite TV. As Javed Akhtar suggests, it's hard to get them back to the village after they've seen MTV, and the institution of arranged marriage may be the deal breaker in the on-going contentious negotiations between tradition-minded elders and their Westernized offspring. Kids today seem to be dead set on selecting their own mates.
One critic has suggested that in the old system women "essentially function as a medium of exchange between male-run families," and the meetings at which matches are finalized do often have the look and feel of corporate merger talks. An expression that in this context seems to resonate more than most is, "You don't marry a person, you marry a family." This slice of conventional Indian wisdom has become a particular focal point of resentment in some of the recent movies made by young Indian-American independents. In Anurag Mehta's American Chai ('01) it is used to condemn a clueless first-generation father (Paresh Rawel) out his own mouth as a repressive fuddy-duddy. The films of this school, which include Nagesh Kukunor's Hydrabdad Blues ('98) and Piyush Pandya's American Desi ('01), have been written off by one observer as "adolescent tantrum movies," exemplifying the high-strung spikiness of young people whose hard-won sense of a separate identity is still fragile. But their success has already inspired a Bollywood response in sleek youth-oriented melodramas like Anubhar Sinha's Tum Bin (Without You, '01) and Farhan (son of Javed) Akthar's Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Desires, '01). The armistice agreement has not been signed, but the culture war is (for better or worse) basically over.
In this sense the major Hindu Family Values films are stop-gap fantasies that offer a temporary, have-your-cake-and-eat it solution to the impasse. There is one gesture (or half-gesture) that occurs so frequently in these films that it has become emblematic for me. This is a form of semi-prostration known (it says here) as upasangrahan, in which a junior reaches down to touch the feet of a revered elder: a parent, a guru, an admired artist. Almost invariably, though, at least on the Hindi screen, the senior party reaches out to at the last minute and, with a loving hand, halts the movement in mid-crouch. (A farcical version of an even more extreme form of the gesture, shaashtaanga, prostration at full length, is enacted in HS-SH by the comic actor Shakti Kapoor-and since the object of his devotion is the regal beauty Tabu we are inclined to sympathize.) The balked form is so ubiquitous that on the rare occasions when actual foot-touching does occur, as it does at the very end of Mohabbatein, the scene takes on an almost ceremonial solemnity.
The plots of these movies chart a strikingly similar course. Sons and daughter are expected to demonstrate their absolute willingness to submit to the dictates of their parents, but the rebellious response this might be expected to provoke is forestalled by a piece of narrative slight of hand: it is also understood that a loving parent would never ultimately force a child to submit to a demand that would truly make him miserable. In Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, when Pooja asks Prem what kind of marriage he would prefer, an arranged marriage or a love marriage, he replies without a moment's hesitation: "An arranged love marriage." Which is exactly the sort of match the movie engineers for him.
Additional information on the Barjatya family amd Rajshri Productions can be found on line at www.rajshri.com. English song lyrics for HAHK can be downloaded from A HREF="www.BollyWHAT.com">www.BollyWHAT.com.
Thanks to: Jacob Levich, Vipul Gupta, Dennis Dort, Lisa Tsering, and Krutin Patel. Also to Muffy, Sydney, Karen, Merideth and many others at rec.arts.movies.local.indian.
1 The cricket-playing cuddly white dog in HAHK, whose name is Tuffy, was one of the few characters omitted from the English-language stage adaptation produced by London's Tamasha Company in 2001, under the title Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings, and A Funeral. The script, which has been published by Methuen, is an almost word-for-word translation of the screenplay.
2 In one of the most impressive recent Family Values variations, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (I Have Given You My Heart, My Love, 99), writer-director Sanjay Leela Bhansali pushes the stylized isolation of the family manse a step further. Although a sizable town is clearly visible in some shots, the callow young "returned hero, played by the ubiquitous Salman Khan, is for some reason obliged to approach and leave the film's patriarchal havali on foot, dragging himself across a trackless waste of sand like an adventurer discovering a lost city in an H. Rider Haggard adaptation.
3 In HS-SH, which overcooks every stylized gesture that is still marginally fresh in HAHK, several junior siblings team up to fulfill this advisory function, putting on a Broadway-slick stage performance for their new bhabi, a satirical revue in which all the senior members of the family are impersonated.
4 Arguably it is not Puri but Amitabh Bachchan who has created the definitive unbending father figure of the Hindi screen: Narayan Shankar in Aditya Chopra's underrated Mohabbatein (Loves,'00). Operating in loco parentis as the stern dean of an exclusive men's college, Shankar gets to make life miserable not just for one or two young people but for several hundred.
5 In HS-SH, typically, the Baguvanti role is tripled, transformed into a witch's chorus of overdressed sarcastic spinsters.
6 The director's latest, Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon [I Am Crazy For Love], with Hrithek Roshan and Kareena Kapoor, is currently in production, but very people seem to be holding their breath.
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