“Bollywood”. Period. Comes of Age. Period.

“Bollywood is finally coming of age/ We are closing in on Hollywood very fast” - Nowadays I hear, or read, this statement or its variants uncomfortably often. Uncomfortable, because I have some objections. Firstly, why “Bollywood”? The term is at best an insult to the rich history of Hindi cinema, and I have not even included our great regional cinema which are derogatively referred to as Mollywood, Tollywood and God only knows how many other “****woods”. Hollywood is only ahead in terms of production values and that’s simply because they are loaded with the greenbacks. The Godfathers of Hollywood can’t even dream of achieving the production values that a regular Mumbai potboiler can achieve, at a beggarly fraction of the average Hollywood budget.

The second part of the statement that makes me uncomfortable is about Hindi cinema pushing the envelope, becoming more intelligent and all that. To those people who hold such opinions, I would like to say that please skip the 70s, 80s and 90s and go back, you will find cinema that was much farther ahead than the most cutting edge stuff that Bombay comes out with nowadays. And no, I’m not talking about high brow, dull, or sleep inducing stuff. I am referring to white knuckle thrillers, vertigo inducing mysteries, stomach bursting comedies and larger than life melodramas. These were movies which were not “inspired” by some substandard Hollywood product. These were original stuff produced by brains that grew upon the power of raw imagination. Minds that had not been paralyzed by information overload, multitasking, dumb television serials and dumber news channels. These were the minds of B.R. Chopra, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, K. Asif, Hrishikesh Muherjee, the Anand brothers (Chetan, Dev and Vijay) and many more. They produced stuff which retains their razor’s edge even forty, fifty, sixty years after their release. Those were the times when people got to see great stuff with much more regularity than we get to see a Lagaan, a Dil Chahta Hai, a Black Friday, a Khosla Ka Ghosla or a Mithya. They had stuff like Awara, Shree 420, Madhumati, Kanoon, Ittefaq, Do Beegha Zameen, Johar Mehmood in Goa/Hong Kong, Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool, Jewel Thief, etc. coming every few months.

But then came the seventies and the angry young Big B, and somehow everything changed. Probably gargantuan hits like Sholay convinced producers and directors that they only had to hire Amitabh Bachchan and the money would come rolling in. Probably the memories of the struggles of Independence had already started dying out… It is said that great works of art have been produced during times of oppression. Probably we had started getting used to the benefits of Independence, started taking it for granted, become complacent and lost our edge somewhere. Probably that’s only partially true, probably we are not proud enough of our country, our heritage, which would have made us find and tell interesting stories… It’s only the Indians who hold Indian film awards in foreign countries… Oh! How we salivate for their attention. It’s only in Hindi cinema where stories are more often than not set in foreign countries, or need excuses in the form of songs to go there. The Chinese tell stories of China, the Iranians tell stories of Iran, and their cinema has long surpassed Hindi cinema in terms of global renown. I don’t want to appear overtly nationalistic, but if we really want to push the envelope and win global respect, then its time that we forget “Bollywood” and tell stories of India and Indians.