Nostalgia for classic Bollywood cinema reigned at the Jaipur Literature Festival, which celebrated 100 years of Indian cinema with several sessions featuring veteran actors and writers, who offered critiques of contemporary Indian film-making.
In the session titled “Bollywood and National Narrative,” Javed Akhtar, the Indian poet and lyricist who scripted several popular Hindi films in the 1970s and ’80s, said that India is a nation of great “movie buffs,” noting that perhaps it was the only country where temples dedicated to movie stars exist.
“If you watch cinema carefully, it tells you a lot about the last 60 to 70 years in India,” Mr. Akhtar, 68, said.
The influence of society on filmmaking was so ingrained that drawing a list of a villain’s character over the years gives a sense of the socioeconomic history of the country, he said. In the 1940s, the villain was the zamindar, or landlord, who exploited the oppressed farmers, he noted. But today, he said, there is no such clear-cut character in society because the line between the heroes and the villains has become blurred.
Pointing to a generational shift in the art of storytelling in Bollywood, Mr. Akhtar argued that nowadays the screenplay is driven by a formulaic method that is aimed at a young, affluent audience who wants to have a good time at the theater and is not willing to engage with serious subjects.
“There is no shortage of stories, but an average producer wants a brand new story that has come before,” he said.
Wistfully, he commented that with the exception of a handful of films, the young generation of filmmakers had “left literature, poetry, art and aesthetics behind.”
But he also said he was hopeful that the next 10 years would usher in an era of more depth in film-making.
In another session on Bollywood, titled “Sex and Sensibility: Women in Cinema,” Shabana Azmi, the veteran Bollywood actress, along with Prasoon Joshi, lyricist, writer and poet, discussed the role of cinema in creating gender perceptions.
Ms. Azmi, who has also worked as a social activist on several issues including women’s rights, argued that Hindi cinema has created an ideal of womanhood based on mythological constructs taken from epics like as the Ramayana. While the character of the vamp was created to satisfy men’s sexual appetites, the ideal woman was docile, submissive and had no sexuality, she said.
“The movies are setting the wrong kinds of role models for young girls,” she said.
Mr. Joshi said it was time that “we realize we are not only mirroring society we are shaping it. People are emulating cinema in their daily lives.”
In a fiery debate among the panelists, a consensus was reached that it was ultimately those involved in the business of film-making who were responsible for perpetuating the stereotypes.
“We are all culpable,” Ms. Azmi said.
The younger generation of writers may have been criticized by some veterans for the lack of sensibility in their work, but even they seemed to agree that some of the more recent films did not have a moral compass.
“The line between the hero and the antihero is blurring, and that is very dangerous,” said Mr. Joshi, who is 41. “The antihero is becoming cool. Crime can’t become cool.”
During a session on screenwriting, Jaideep Sahni, a screenwriter and lyricist who has some notable films to his credit, including “Kholsa Ka Ghosla” and “Chake De India” warned against having too much nostalgia for the past. He grew up watching films in the 1980s and the 1990s, and “they had bad scripts,” he said.
“There was a tyranny of listening to the same thing again and again,” he said.
He said a certain kind of popular, commercial entertainment was being considered the “be all and end all” but is having a negative impact on cinema.
However, the screenwriter, who is in his 40s, defended young screenwriters and lyricists like him, saying that they watched old films and listened to old Bollywood music but made films about the present times.
Tommaso Boddi/Wireimage
