Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth

19. Bombay Boys: Dissolving the Male Child in Popular Hindi Cinema

350 19 bombay boys Dissolving the Male Child in Popular Hindi Cinema Although India’s art and popular cinemas are conventionally opposed in terms of realism and fantasy, commercial films have not shied away from depicting the poverty and suffering of Indian children , though they commonly treat childhood problems as familial rather than social, in the manner of most commercial cinemas. Except in rare films that focus entirely on the plight of children, such as Boot Polish (1954) or Dosti (Friendship) (1964), childhood in Hindi cinema is generally staged as a primal scene projecting the adult protagonist’s identity, actions, and fate. 1 Characters in Hindi films are persistently wounded yet driven by their childhood pain, drawing a direct causal—and conscious—chain between the suffering of youth and the acts of adulthood, a link regularly figured by formal transitions that instantly transform boys into men. Providing immediate maturation, such temporal leaps imply the inconsequence or irrelevance of adolescent experience in shaping both character and narrative. In this essay I want to investigate the representation of boyhood in popular Hindi cinema by focusing upon a common formal device for effecting a narrative ellipsis, a focus which also motivates a historical inquiry revealing an unexpected continuity in Hindi cinema between independence and the early 1990s, when more significant but less obvious changes begin to alter the construction of masculinity in Indian popular culture. It can be demonstrated (though also overstated) that the implicitly modern Hindi cinema maintains a continuity with traditional Indian culture, relying, for instance, on regular allusions to the ancient Sanskrit epics, the Mahabarata and Ramayana, that are neither esoteric nor obscure for contemporary and sometimes illiterate audiences. At the same time, perhaps especially in its treatment of the hero, popular Indian cinema is relentlessly topical and shamelessly trendy, and is recognized to have regularly reflected (and influenced) changing cultural and political Corey K. Creekmur Dissolving the Male Child in Popular Hindi Cinema 351 contexts. Most notably, film critics have commonly understood the mid-1970s redefinition of the Hindi film hero as an “angry young man” within the context of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” (1975–77), her notorious clampdown on civil liberties following challenges to the legitimacy of her 1971 election. In what follows I will argue that this much-discussed revision of the film hero belies a deeper continuity, whereas more recent films, widely seen as drawing back the middle-class family audience displaced from cinema halls by two decades of violent action films, demonstrate a potentially more significant transformation in the popular performance of Indian masculinity. Dissolving Indian Boys into Men Since at least the 1940s, commercial Indian filmmakers have employed flashbacks, montage sequences, and frame-tales to creatively plot their typically long (three hours is the norm), sometimes convoluted , and frequently multigenerational narratives. Often spanning decades (if not centuries, sometimes via reincarnated characters), Hindi film plots necessarily employ formal ellipses that omit or condense large segments of story time. I will limit this analysis to a technique pervasive enough to constitute one of Hindi cinema’s dominant tropes even though this device, familiar to all fans of Indian cinema, hasn’t been explored in the growing body of Indian film criticism. What I will identify as the “maturation dissolve” suggests nothing less than a cultural perspective condensed into a narrative —and distinctively cinematic—technique. 2 In numerous Hindi films, an opening segment—sometimes preceding a long-withheld credit sequence—introduces the main character as a boy before leaping forward in time, usually through a prominent formal transition, to depict him as a man, ensuring through various continuity devices that we recognize the adult onscreen (usually a familiar star) to be the grown embodiment of the same character whose childhood has already drawn our interest and sympathy. Ganga Jumna (1961) provides a typical example: after they are orphaned, young Ganga drives a bullock cart to support his younger brother Jumna’s education. A shot of the boy atop his cart cuts to a close-up of the animals pulling it, and then to a shot of the revolving wheel of the cart: this image remains visible as rural fields are dissolved in, before they fade away to reveal the wheel alone again, reversing the pattern exactly through another corey k. creekmur 352 cut to the animals and then back to Ganga singing as a young man, now played by the instantly recognizable star...