Indian fashion for man

Mani Rathnam, the Tamil movie director whose work was showcased as part of the "India NOW!" program at the 19th Toronto International Film Festival, could turn out to be a breakthrough figure. He may be the John Woo or Tsui Hark of southern India, a popular artist who expresses himself fully in a commercial idiom. Which I suppose makes actor Kamal Haasan, who took the title role in Rathnam's sinewy 1987 gangster epic Nayakan ("Hero"), a set of sharply pointed variations on The Godfather, the Chow Yun-fat of Madras.

Haasan's performance as Velu, the son of a murdered union leader who becomes a smuggler and then a lordly mob boss sticking up for the downtrodden, stands up well to an obvious comparison with the Corleone dons of Pacino and De Niro. In addition to a solid force of personality that comes through effortlessly, Kamal exhibits qualities of sweetness and playfulness that have so far eluded those dour thespians. (The actor is often referred to simply as "Kamal" by the home court fans; the name means "lotus" in Tamil.) Haasan is one of those natural movie stars who simply seem to have more life in them than anyone else.

In Bharathan's highly effective family melodrama Thevar Magan ("Thevar's Son," '92), Kamal first appears as a callow princeling in trendy city clothes, returning to the feudal landscape of his ancestral estate in jungly Tamil Nadu, and shifts before our eyes into a solid, deep-rooted, commanding figure that is a lot closer to his usual star persona. Haasan seems to absorb all the weight of regional tradition, to make it a part of his own substance, acquiring so much density that his feet should be sinking into the earth at every step. When his sophisticated fiancee (Gowthami) returns after several months to find him transformed from a modern young gogetter into a grave and terrifying country patriarch, he is no longer a mere human being but, in coming into his inheritance, has evolved into a sacred monster, a rural demigod.

Both Nayakan and Thevar Magan manage to suggest the ambiguity of Haasan's motives as he represses his own feelings in order to embrace hidebound patriarchal values. What redblooded guy wouldn't prefer a culturally validated lord-and-master role to wrestling with all the compromises and half measures of modern egalitarian manhood? In their own distinctive, toughminded fashion, these two pictures are wish-fulfillment fantasies, and they may be more representative of the current Indian film scene than some snooty Anglos are tempted to assume.

The "India NOW!" sidebar, assembled by programmers David Overbey and Noah Cowen, offered Anglo--North American observers a rare opportunity to see a slew of commercial Indian movies over a ten-day span that made the interconnections and implications all but impossible to miss. India turns out over 600 movies a year, in ten regional languages, most of them "music dramas"--if you consider shimmying nautch girls who rob trains, dashing disco dancers who are also psycho killers, and political prisoners who serenade their absent loved ones from captivity the stuff of high drama. In India, most commercial movies are expected to incorporate six to eight songs and/or dance numbers. "Film songs," in fact, have been part and parcel of the Indian popular music industry since the preplayback period of the Thirties, when all sound was recorded live and only singers could become movie stars.

Around the turn of the century, we're told, the bombastic conventions of imported British blood-and-thunder stage melodramas merged with the "music drama" structures of native devotional theater forms like tamascha and jatra, to shape some of the most visible characteristics of Indian cinema. The pattern was set, according to critic Somi Roy, by the subcontinent's very first feature film, D.M. Phalke's Raja Harischandra ('12), which was based upon an episode of the Indian national epic Mahabharata. "Indian cinema," Roy writes, in an essay published in Asian Art & Culture (Spring-Summer 1994), "had begun retelling or reinterpreting a mythology. In doing so, cinema joined a two-thousand-year-old tradition." To this day, Roy believes, "[Indian] film characters represent not complex psychological entities but ethical archetypes."

This is a narrative environment that was infused from the outset with mythological fantasy, where gods routinely walk the earth and the natural and the supernatural, the real and the surreal, are fully expected to intermingle--where anything is possible. In Indian movies reality is volatile, always on the verge of bleeding over into its supposed opposite. Indeed, caustic observers like V.S. Naipaul have seen the subcontinent's apparent inability to disentangle fact and fantasy as an obstacle to humane progress in that beleaguered corner of the world.

For a while there was room in Indian film production for both "socials"--topical dramas that often championed (even as they romanticized) the downtrodden --and old-fashioned "mythologicals." And India's collective fantasies were at least benign in the immediate aftermath of independence, in the Fifties, when progressive commercial artists like Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, and Bimal Roy made popular entertainments that actively promoted secular liberal values, particularly brotherhood across lines of class, caste, and religion. But the movies' central fantasies seemed to turn vicious somewhere along in the Seventies, in the widely imitated super-antihero adventures of the definitive Indian superstar of the last two decades, Amitabh Bachchan, whose underdog prowess bordered on the supernatural.

Amitabh films like Mard ("He-Man," '84) and Lawaaris ("The Disinherited," '81) operate in a realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy so extreme they become surreal. Plots as far-fetched as an El Santo tale are deployed with all the pomp and gravity of Biblical epics. (Literally. In Mukul S. Anand's 1992 Khuda Gawah, aka As God Is My Witness, Amitabh sports a Mosaic beard and his voice on the soundtrack is mixed louder than everybody else's, with a reverb on it. He delivers the most mundane dialogue in thunder, like a proclamation.) With their superintelligent animal sidekicks, their twin brothers separated at birth (one good, one bad), their long-suffering mothers afflicted with amnesia, their slinky rich girls who make calf-eyes at sweat-stained tongawallas, these films seem to be working overtime to cram in every last cheesy convention of pulp romance and melodrama. (In fairness, they do have a minimum of two-and-a-half hours of running time to fill; Indian audiences apparently prefer their movies long.)

With the rise of Bachchan, there no longer seemed to be any sharp distinction between mythological beings and mere mortals on the Hindi screen. Something similar occurred a few years ago in Tamil Nadu, when superstar M.G. Ramchandran (MGR) played so many godlike heroes that the supernatural luster seemed to rub off and he was swept into statewide office. Bachchan rarely played literally supernatural figures, but despite the street-level look and sound of his characters they were demonic entities, embodiments of unstoppable social and psychic forces, rolling over every obstacle.

Indian cinema is devoted to escapist fantasy to a degree that may seem grotesque, given the dire extremity of the reality outside the theater. The best documentaries in "India NOW!" zeroed in on this vexing issue, struggling to find a sharp line between actuality and illusion. Anand Patwardhan's Father, Son, and Holy War is mostly about the alarming recent rise of nationalist and Hindu fundamentalist movements in India, culminating in the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu radicals, and a string of retaliatory bombings in Bombay. In an explosive final segment, Patwardhan explores the images of ferocious masculinity promulgated by the Indian mass media; by the post-Amitabh cinema most of all. "Every Indian movie poster looks like Rambo, now," the filmmaker says, exaggerating only slightly.

Jill Misquitta, who wrote Dilip Ghosh's Children of the Silver Screen ('90), about Bollywood's ubiquitous child stars, frankly sees the distortions and falsifications of personality inflicted upon these malleable souls as a metaphor for the inherent falseness of Hindi cinema and its entire worldview. "Film should be an act of compassion, not exploitation," she says. "The falseness of Bombay cinema distorts the human soul."