A hardback biography in Rajesh Khanna (Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna, HarperCollins Publishers India) sells out its 5000-copy print run in three months. A book of interviews with film-makers, by first-time author Rakesh Anand Bakshi, talking of their journey to their first film reprints within three months of publishing (Directors Diaries, HarperCollins Publishers India). A book on 50 classic Hindi film songs (Gaata Rahe Mera Dil, HarperCollins Publishers India) does the same. Books as varied as Satyajit Ray’s The Pather Panchali Sketchbook, a biography of Nasir Hussain by Akshay Manwani, film monographs on DDlJ, QSQT and Mr India, plus a box set of Gulzar’s films (Aandhi, Angoor and Ijaazat), books on popular Hindi cinema are coming out thick and fast inundated. Cinema, and Bollywood popular cinema, in particular, seems to have emerged as the flavour of the season among authors and academics. And almost all top-notch publishers are falling over themselves in churning out the next big Bollywood book.
For a nation obsessed with films and film stars, there has been very little writing on cinema in India, till very recently. For years it has been limited to either low-brow film magazines with their salacious gossip and self-serving interviews of stars, or esoteric studies of popular culture characterised by a scholarly outlook and full of academic jargon. We had ourStardusts andFilmfares and we had such scholarly treatises like Gayatri Chatterjee’s Awara and Mother India. There was no middle ground, no informed, insightful look, in a non-academic vein, at what is undoubtedly India’s most visible cultural phenomenon.
Hindi cinema, in particular, was looked upon as frivolous, mere ‘time-pass’. It wasn’t meant to be studied or analysed in any great depth. Not only that, the so-called ‘respectable’ classes looked upon any interest in cinema as a symptom of delinquency. Many of us in our teens in the early 1980s, for example, will remember how elders in the family equated Hindi cinema with a fall in grades and sundry other vices. Trips to the cinema were surreptitious affairs, hidden from parental knowledge. And there were few misdemeanours greater than being caught reading a film magazine. This tendency to look down on cinema was not limited to the lay person. Even a megastar like Amitabh Bachchan repeatedly dismissed attempts to study and analyse his stardom and its influence by commenting, to give just one example, on one of his films which was criticised for its violence and vulgarity, ‘It is a film, not to be taken seriously’ (Filmfare, August 1-15, 1986). Thus, it does not come as a surprise that writers in India, except of course those who did academic research on the subject, thought that writing on popular cinema would put them in the category of non-serious or dilettante writers.
Bollywood in the national consciousness
This perception has changed with the commercial success of Hindi cinema in the NRI markets and the rising currency of its stars around the world. Hindi films have become respectable. They have emerged, as Amitav Ghosh so cogently puts it in his essay ‘The March of the Novel through History’, as the ‘most widely circulated cultural artefacts the world has ever known’. Hindi cinema is being feted around the world. It is finding acceptance in the bastions of high culture. It is no longer a ‘guilty hidden passion’, as Jerry Pinto puts it, regarded with contempt.
The new Indian middle class which cannot seem to have enough of Bollywood, as visible in the surfeit of Bollywood-driven programmes on prime-time TV, is driving the interest in film-related publishing, thanks to the opening up of the retail sector in India. Now, publishers have much more opportunity to reach out to the potential customer, through book clubs, web stores, books in shopping centres, even multiplexes. All of which makes Bollywood-oriented publishing more viable than before. This cannot but have an effect on a new breed of writers who have caught on to this interest and have wrested film writing from the domain of the academic. Bollywood has recently become mainstream hot property. Consequently, it has become a viable business proposition for book publishers, with an eager audience waiting to read more about their favourite star or movie.
Though biographies, and tell-all biographies of stars at that, are what majorly drives the market so far, there have been a lot of interest in writing on cinema in general: From film analysis to writings on music and lyricists to niche subjects like women film-makers (a forthcoming title from HarperCollins) to the collector’s edition on Pather Panchali mentioned above. And though we continue to be a nation that watches its films more than reads them (big numbers are still a problem unless it’s a big star biography), a lot of HarperCollins books on cinema have reprinted on a regular basis: The biographies of RD Burman, Rajesh Khanna, Sahir ludhianvi, Satyajit Ray’s book of essays Deep Focus, Nemai Ghosh’s book on Satyajit Ray titled, Manik-da. There is no denying that the current crop of books is more accessible, the narrative style far removed from the grim theorising of academic tomes,without degenerating into flippant newspaper/magazine reportage.The conscious ‘film studies’ style of writing which only the scholar could read has given way to a chatty, anecdotal style which engages the reader in a one-to-one.
Future perfectIJ
So, is this interest in film books a passing fancy, the flavour of the season so to speak, or do the publishers feel the trend will continue to pay in the long termIJ As far as I can see, the season is here to stay as most of these books have done extremely well in terms of sales and critical appreciation.
There is no denying that India is still some way from being a fully evolved film book market. But as the readership grows and as we have more writers and publishers investing time and money into books, one can expect to see some fascinating books. I think we aren’t there yet, both in terms of content and style, but we will get there, sooner rather than later. The huge market cinema commands and its merchandising potential are bound to affect the book world as well. Film in India is too valuable a chunk of cultural history not to cover.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Managing Editor, HarperCollins India