Bollywood conjures up many images of spectacular dance numbers, opulent sets, hyperbolic acting and general mindless fun. Since the beginning of Indian cinema, religion and faith have influenced the story lines that create the largest film industry in the world today.
The Mahabharat and the Ramayana are the two major Sanskrit texts of ancient India. The Mahabharat is an epic poem containing 100,000 verses discussing duty, purpose, pleasure, and liberation. The Ramayana focuses on Rama and Sita, a married couple who face infidelity, kidnapping, and war on a cosmic level.
Bollywood since the silent film era has alluded to aspects of the Mahabharat and Ramayana to highlight the struggle of good against evil. The two epics were performed at the theatre and in Ram-Lila plays, or street plays, but with the advent of cinema the epics were translated to screen. The Talkies era of 1920s Bollywood established the star system, and religious movies were swept aside by the tidal wave of song and dance movies, relegated to B movie status .
Faith in mainstream Bollywood however, was not lost, as the stories of the heroes and heroins of the Mahabharat and Ramayana found their way into contemporary movies. The hero in a Bollywood movie adopts traits of the many Hindu gods and characters in mythology. He is expected to rescue his heroine from a big bad villain, while crooning a song to please her ears.
The golden age of Bollywood, the 1950s, challenged these idealized versions of heroes by turning them into a vagabond in Raj Kapoor’s Aawara (The Tramp) or a seedy blackmailer of Dev Anand in Jaal (Trap), who were now grey and full of ennui.
With the Indo-China wars in the ‘60s, Bollywood once again became a route for escapism churning out more and more storylines from the Mahabharat and the Ramayana. This brought a spate of female oriented weepy dramas that had an a do-gooder hero, reflective of the gods, marry a pregnant heroine to save her honour.
During the Emergency rule by the Indira Gandhi government in the 70s people were angry, and the hero, reflecting the political tension at the time, was now a tall, dark and Byronic Amitabh Bachan, the first hero to be all the gods and kick some ass too! Bachan played a vengeful police officer who obsessed over finding his parents killer in his breakout movie Zanjeer (Symbol). The movie gave Bachan his angry-young man persona and birthed the term “dishoom dishoom:” the sound of Bachan’s beating up villains!
The heroine has endured some shape shifting in her time as well. Bollywood has idealized the heroine as a sacrificing Sita of the Ramayana, and the powerful Draupadi of the Mahabharat. Since the beginning of Indian cinema, a heroine has the voice of a nightingale, has sacrificed her love for her family, is a wonderful mother and wife, and encourages the hero to embrace his piousness.
The ‘20s and ‘30s was an experimental time for the heroine, she could go to work, wear trousers, and kiss her hero torridly. A milestone for the growth of the heroine was Hunterwali (Hunter Woman) where the Anglo-Indian heroine, Fearless Nadia, performed daring stunts on top a train and wore trousers and cracked a whip!
This reemerged in the 1950s. The heroine could be a cabaret dancer with a heart of gold like Geeta Bali in Baazi (Game) or a strong fearless woman of the untouchable caste like Nutan in Sujata.
The 1960s became the Gilded Age for the heroine, as she was forced to sacrifice her love of the hero to marry her parent’s choice, and the only intimacy was a cutaway shot of bees and flowers! The return to religious allusions brought many female-orientated movies based on the stories of Ramayana, and other wronged female gods like Shakuntala. Faith in the ‘60s was a point of reforming; a bad cabaret vamp that soon dresses in saris and sings devotional songs to successfuly win his love.
One such movie is Jab Jab Phool Khile (When a Flower Blossoms) where the glamorous well dressed heroine goes on holiday to Kashmir; she unexpectedly falls for a simpleton boatman. She tries to reform him to her cosmopolitan ways by teaching him to do the twist and wear suits, but he rejects the lifestyle and leaves. She then sings a devotional, lovesick song and transforms from haughty cosmopolitan to dutiful wife to win him. Movies like these only lasted until the 1970s, where the vigilante hero took the focus.
As Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule disenchanted moviegoers, the hero who fights the law came to the forefront, and the heroine was now relegated to singing songs because the hero who was too angry to sing and dance. The rise of the multi-starrers made the girls into trophy heroines there to pacify the hero’s obsession with justice. Violence and sex were the fervour of the day, and heroines were wearing skimpier outfits to titillate feverish villains, only too ready to kidnap them Ramayana style.
Heroines also turned into vamps, who swigged alcohol with the hero’s and were sexualized by the camera. Zeenat Aman, the path breaking revisionist heroine was relaxed about her sexuality and advocated free love. Her roles varied from junkies, to gold diggers, from a career woman, to an adulterous wife. Other heroines too, squeezed into to tighter clothes and adopted Aman’s vivacity. Here were heroines that would not cave too easily to religion and be reformed by a hero, as now the hero was a vigilante who blamed the gods for his suffering like Bachan’s famous character Vijay in Deewaar (Wall).
Though the violent blockbusters raged on at the cinemas, the underground religious movies still had a place. And surprisingly a religious epic Jai Santoshi Maa (Hail the Goddess of Satisfaction) was one of the biggest money-spinners of 1975. The movie was a tacky devotional film about a woman, who prays to Santoshi Maa, to get her husband to love and respect her.
Faith in Bollywood has gradually lessened with filmmakers experimenting with taboo themes, but at the heart, the conventional hero and heroine remain intertwined with the gods and mortals from the Mahabharat and Ramayana.
