Back in the 20th century, when India had villages, there were several popular films that showed villages in a contemporary light. Well, somewhat. While Indian cinema was urban from its very beginning, there were several films of immense popularity that were, in many ways, a statement of the presence of the Indian village. In these films, the protagonist was often a villager or a city-bred male who headed out to the village. For the city folk, these films were reminders. Villainising moneylenders that cheated farmers, calling for land reforms and reminding us that agriculture was at the monsoon's mercy, these films told us that there was an India that lived in the villages. There was the image of a Dilip Kumar racing his horse cart with a motorbus to save his livelihood. Of a Nargis personifying the notion of the mother and the motherland. Of a Manoj Kumar, plough on his shoulder, wearing his patriotism on his sleeve. Of a Sunil Dutt galloping on horseback to avenge himself, defiant in the ravines of Chambal. Of a Raj Kapoor driving a bullock cart, singing songs that one associated intrinsically with cart drivers without ever having met one.
Then, sometime close to the turn of the century, the village disappeared from major popular films. Just like that. It now appears in the mandatory dance number in which the youthful lead couple gyrate in rippling fields along with a dance troupe suitably accessorised for an ethnic romp. The pastoral retreat ends with the dance number, and they return to their courtship in college corridors. The last big banner village-set film to achieve commercial success was Lagaan, and it relied heavily on the drama of a very urban device -- a cricket match. The village does appear sometimes as the birthing ground of the protagonist, but even this is not too common now. And then there are the exotic villages -- remember Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge or Raja Babu -- which enact the farmhouse fantasies of the neo-rich. This kind of depiction of villages is nothing new. But now, this is the dominant representation. The village is definitely the Other.
This real Other India also watches films. Films that people in the cities don't see, don't even know about. Pejoratively called B grade films -- on account of subjects addressed, the lack of glamorous stars, low budgets and a small-but-assured recovery of money -- these films are considered too raw. Jagged edges intact, they head straight for the rural market. These include Hindu mythological dramas and soft porn. Ramesh Sippy, director of the 1975 Sholay, perhaps India's the most celebrated film, points out that the rural market has now gone to regional language cinema. Why? Sippy says the big filmmakers, like people in any other business, are gunning for the high-end customer who has the money to pay upwards of Rs 100 at a multiplex cinema hall. "It is easier to recover money from a film if it runs at a multiplex for a few weeks. The ticket rates in small towns and villages are much lower." There are no quality films for the B and C grade market, another director points out.
So you now have a new genre -- the multiplex film. What is it? Taran Adarsh, editor of Trade Guide that keeps a tab on the film industry, gives the examples of Kal Ho Na Ho or Munna Bhaiyya mbbs. "The rural has slowly but surely been weeded out of Bollywood films," says Anupama Chopra, journalist and author who knows the film industry from the inside. "The current generation of young filmmakers are mostly second-generation film guys who have grown up in big cities. For them, the rural is a foreign land and they can only make films about what they know or what they are interested in." One of the darlings of the multiplex box office, Karan Johar, says he has never thought about making a film set in a village. "I started out young as a film maker. I grew up in the city and my favourite filmmakers were Raj Kapoor (his later films like Bobby) and Yash Chopra. I haven't travelled in villages and I don't experiment with what I don't know," says Johar, 30, whose Kuch Kuch Hota Hai became a sensation in 1996. So what is the audience that the new lot has in mind? "People all over, right from the small towns to Manhattan, USA. I can make an entertaining film for all of them," says Shaan Ali, 28, a filmmaker in Mumbai who has just begun his second film. The overseas market has become more important that ever before. Traditionally, Indian films did well in the Soviet Union and the Central Asian states. But now, this has expanded to Northern and Eastern Africa, West Asia, Southeast Asia, Mauritius and even the US and UK markets are very important for the filmmaker. The social profile of the NRI film viewer is the same as that of the multiplex regular in an Indian city.
Sippy says the multiplex has had a positive impact on small budget filmmakers who make films for an urban audience. Ashis Nandy, eminent sociologist with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, says that for the first time he is seeing films made primarily for the urban audience: "Look at the films like Kaante and Jhankar Beats. You wouldn't have seen them earlier."
David Dhawan, director, says the subjects depicted in today's films are too shallow. "Village-based subjects had a lot of emotion attached to them. That's where the roots of our identity lie," he says. But he acknowledges that filmmakers are not attempting village settings because they are scared. Taran Adarsh, editor of Trade Guide which keeps a tab on the film industry, says it is much cheaper to make a film in the Mumbai studios than on location. Most Mumbai directors say creating a visual spectacle is very important to succeed commercially. To create a visual spectacle in a village is much more difficult and expensive. But very few directors want to take the risk and deviate from the formula. Legendary actor Naseeruddin Shah is deeply cynical: "To the best of my knowledge, [popular cinema] serves two functions, namely, to keep the audience opiated and to garner vast sums of money for those involved in it. End of discussion. Issues? What the hell are they?"
Mehboob Khan was a man of contradictions. The emblem of his film company was a hammer and sickle, accompanied by the voiceover that read a popular couplet that proclaimed Allah's will to be final. In 1957, Khan made arguably the most definitive film -- Mother India. It opens with a shot of two larger than life mother symbols -- Nargis and the soil. As the camera zooms out and the credits appear, a combined harvester and a tractor rolls by, followed by a tableau of shots of power supply lines, construction of bridges and roads. A khadi-clad bunch goes up to the old woman and tells her that an irrigation canal has reached the village, and ask her to inaugurate it. The Nehruvian dream -- Mehboob was a great admirer of the first prime minister -- is brought to completion by the image of a dam, an important theme in several films from the 1950s.
The reasons for this large number of films with rural themes are not difficult to trace. For one, a lot of the people writing these films -- the likes of Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailedra and Kaifi Azmi -- had Marxist leanings. The country had recently got freed from British control, and the desire to create a new nation was very much alive. Some of these writers came from well-to-do families and were rebelling against the status quo that the older generation represented. Kaifi Azmi, for instance, was from a feudal family in Uttar Pradesh. He was a member of the Communist Party and the Indian People's Theatre Association. He lived in a commune established by the party, and began writing scripts to help run the commune. No wonder the rebel son of a feudal family was a common hero. The films they wrote reflected their ideological leanings. Besides, the Bengal famine of the 1940s had brought a large number of villagers to Calcutta, drawing the city's attention to the plight of the villages.
The cities themselves were flush with migrants from rural areas. Though they were urbanising fast and were lapping up the fashionably urbane Dev Anand and the sophisticated Dilip Kumar, they could relate to issues of the villages. Most filmmakers, too, were first generation migrants to Mumbai. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Delhi-based filmmaker/writer, cautions against any notions that popular cinema truly reflected rural India in the mid-20th century. He says a lot of the rural representation was ideological.
The man who came to symbolise ideological representation of the true Indian villager, however, was Manoj Kumar. The overpowering theme of Manoj Kumar's films was patriotism, whether it was set in the village (Upkaar) or in the transboundary experience of NRIs (Purab Aur Paschim). In fact, in large parts of the country he was known as Bharat Kumar, the name of the character he plays in Upkaar. The films borrowed a lot from Bimal Roy's realistic depiction of the villages, but a major point of departure was the patriotic baggage and the intermittent messages of family planning. Manoj Kumar became the celluloid avatar of the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s. It was the image of the self-sacrificing farmer who was producing bumper crops to wipe out the national shame of C Subramaniam being sent to the US beg for food. Another reason for the young nation's pride taking a beating was the confrontation with China. Manoj Kumar took it upon himself to restore that pride. He became synonymous with Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's call of 'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan'. The song Manoj Kumar is most readily associated with, 'Mere desh ki dharti...', was a renewal of faith in the productivity of our soil and our farmer. The idea of the farmer who could speak English but still dressed in khadi was internationally reassuring. This farmer didn't sell his crop to the village moneylender and fought with fellow farmers who hoarded foodgrain so that there were no food shortages in the city. In the 1960s, all the food grown on the country's soil belonged to the country.
A variant theme of the village drama that went on to become a genre of its own was the dacoity film. Mother India had dealt with the dacoity issue at length, establishing Sunil Dutt as the archetypal rebel from Chambal. But one of the earliest films to deal with the subject at length was Raj Kapoor's Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai. It posed the Hindu Vaishnav ethic of Raju, a well-meaning, idealistic member of a singing community, against a trigger-happy bunch of dacoits. Coming at the time of a campaign influenced by Vinoba Bhave to get dacoits to surrender, the film opens with tough men looting a village, and the next sequence takes us to the dwellings of the dacoits, where they live just like any other villager with their wives and children. The hero of the film is a scared young man who has the courage of conviction to save the police from the dacoits and the dacoits from the police -- and both from themselves. The climax has the hero managing to get the dacoits to surrender to save the lives of their womenfolk and children.
The film attacked a lot of clichs about dacoits. But the dacoit film developed along the lines of revenge. Here were the inklings of the anti-hero that would so dominate later day popular cinema. Sunil Dutt, the personification of this genre, had such durability that his son Sanjay Dutt has also made a career out of the anti-hero.
But the most prominent dacoit film came in 1975. Sholay by Ramesh Sippy was one of the watersheds of Indian cinema. Here was a story set in the village with several larger than life characters. The lead duo of two petty criminals, Jai and Veeru, take the viewer through the experience of living in a village to capture a dacoit. In the process, we see two petty criminals develop a desire to become farmers and stay back in the village. Today's filmmakers recognise that the writers of Sholay, Javed Akhtar and Saleem Khan, were again people who had travelled in villages. In fact, one of the biggest phenomena of Sholay was the creation of a new kind of villain in Gabbar Singh, who was much more rustic than his 'smooth' predecessors -- Pran, Ajit, Kanhaiyalal, K N Singh. The way Gabbar enjoyed violence took the viewer to another plane. In fact, in the first two weeks of its release, Sholay was labelled a flop because there was no reaction to the film. Only later did people realise that the silence was due to the audience not having seen anything like that before.
The love of violence and mistreatment of women became hallmarks of the hero in the 1970s, especially with regard to the phenomenon that became Amitabh Bachchan. The rural names of the hero had changed to the more urban Vijay and Ravi. By this time there was a clear shift in the filmmakers, too: the interest in villages was waning.
Raj Kapoor had moved away from his Nehruvian phase to the image of being the showman who made the likes of Bobby and Satyam Shivam Sundaram. The children of the first generation migrants to the city had grown up. While the village was not as potent a presence as it had been a generation ago, it was still there, lurking in the background. But now there was little talk of the hero going back to the village. Also, the nature of his heroism had changed from two decades ago. Gone was the submissive, innocent stereotype of the 1950s or the self-sacrifice of the 1960s. The 1970s hero had forgotten most of that -- except what he needed to remember to take revenge. It is not that films were not set in villages. But the major banners were regularly looking elsewhere.
The 1970s and the 1980s saw a peculiar morphed village in the films featuring Feroze Khan. It was inspired by the Hollywood Western. In fact, the rustic scene in Satte Pe Satta was also from the Western. Another variation of the village in films was seen in the films featuring Sachin (Nadiya Ke Paar and Geet Gata Chal). But the most ridiculous depiction is reserved for tribals and nomads in popular cinema. The tribal song sequence is a favourite set-piece, allowing the filmmaker to show skin and outlandish attires. In fact, the tribals are often used to convey provide images of savagery and fear. The 1976 Kabeela shows a Feroze Khan dressed like John Wayne. The film opens with an introduction of tribes, depicting them as incomplete strands in the chart of human evolution.
The consciousness of village issues also came in films not set expressly in the village. Saagar is a very engaging confrontation between large fishing trawlers and small fisherfolk. Kala Patthar, inspired by a major mining accident, became a statement in justification of nationalisation of coalmines. In both the cases, the hero was somebody who fought for the rights of the vulnerable. In several ways, these films touched upon issues of economic policy without resorting to the burden of the established norms of representation of villages.
The late 1970s saw the inclusion of forest in the concurrent list, paving the way for the Forest Conservation Act. 1979 saw the release of Kartavya, which showed Dharmendra as an honest divisional forest officer who fights with a tiger to save a little girl. The film opens with an elaborate speech by Ashok Kumar on the importance of the ecological balance and the need to conserve wildlife and forests.
By the time Manmohan Singh's economic reforms started to roll in the early 1990s, Govinda had become a sensation, especially in the films of David Dhawan. The 1990s also saw films made in southern India storming the northern markets as well as Hindi dubs of Hollywood films like Jurassic Park. The market was changing faster than ever. This period also saw the success of a mix of romantic-social drama, beginning with the success of the 1994 Hum Apke hain Kaun, a very long marriage video on 70 mm. Two of the most important films to build on this were Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). With the NRI becoming more important than ever before due to the foreign exchange they brought with them, the multiplex film was born.
Dilwale... is a very interesting study in the NRI mentality that today's filmmaker is so desperate to capture. It opens with a middle aged Indian migrant in London describing how out of place he is. He craves to get back to his land of origin. On receiving a letter from his friend in Punjab, he announces that the family will go back and marry his daughter (played by Kajol) to his friend's son. He announces pride at the fact that his daughter has meekly submitted to his will, a mark of Indian culture. Against this is the character of the young man (played by Shahrukh Khan), also a migrant, who plays rugby, drives fast cars, and has blended in. His claim to the role of the protagonist is that he is cool, that he has attitude. His name: Raj Malhotra. In fact, the protagonist of the multiplex film often has names like Raj, Rohit and Rahul, a clear shift away from the Vijays and Ravis of the 1970s and the Shankars and Rajus of the 1950s. Of course, Kajol's father -- him with the dream of returning to the fields of Punjab -- does not think he is eligible for her. The girl on her part is totally submissive to the will of her father. As the father returns to his roots in Punjab, these contradictions are presented as part and parcel of 'Indian culture'.
Some other recent depictions of villages in popular films worth noting are in Mahesh Manjrekar's Jis Desh Mein Ganga Rehta Hai and Apoorva Lakhia's Mumbai Se Aya Mera Dost. The former has Govinda playing Ganga, a rich man's son brought up by a shepherd couple because he has to be kept away from his blood relations (and close to sheep) till the age of 25. A major part of the film is set in the village, but there is very little of village to see. Its presence is very iconic. We see only one house other than Ganga's, and that belongs to Sanwali, his love interest, played by Sonali Bendre. The rest is merely real estate for the all-too-familiar dance numbers that make the Govinda version of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
Mumbai... is a standard masala film with some interesting cinematic twists in the narrative. You see the protagonist and his friend watching people of a Rajasthani village who are watching The Matrix on cable television. The plot revolves around a love affair set in conflicting urban and rural sensibilities. The urban protagonist Kanji, played by Abhishek Bachchan, stays back in the village in the end. His introduction of cable television has left a deep impact on the village. The villagers you see are very believable, and yet fantastically comic because one is too used to seeing idealised notions of a village in popular cinema.
"...the medium of film. Of course, as a cultural product is not rooted in the villages; it is clearly an urban phenomenon. In the popular Hindi film, village life is depicted as the world 'outside' or the world where 'our roots lie'. But this is an urban reflection. It does not reproduce the villagers' needs, neither emotional nor aesthetic. For them, the medium of film represents the 'outside world' which has no relationship to their own social and psychic world." 
This argument is, however, valid only up to a point. It would be foolish to believe that most of those who live in India's urban areas are completely impervious to what happens in the rural hinterland. It is common knowledge that while agriculture accounts for a fourth of the country's gross domestic product, it directly or indirectly provides livelihood to 60 per cent of the population. If executives in multinationals manufacturing fast-moving consumer goods understand this basic fact about India, why indeed should editors downplay stories on agriculture? Unless, that is, one is talking about a cretinous bunch of journos and their employers.
Consider telecommunications, often lauded as a shining example of a sector where the entry of private players has worked wonders for the consumer. Call charges are down, telephone connections are available on demand and a mobile will soon no longer remain an accessory of the well-off. That's one side of the story. What is not so well publicized is that out of the 6,07,491 villages in the country, close to one lakh (to be precise, 99,339) villages did not have a single phone till the end of 2002. Whereas private providers of basic telephone services had committed themselves to installing as many as 98,000 phones in villages by March 2002 (that is, one out of ten phones installed), they instead preferred to pay paltry fines instead of setting up phones in rural areas.
Yet this story is not considered as "sexy" as an article on the special features of the latest hand-held gizmo. A Sony Ericsson P-900 mobile phone is priced at around Rs 45,000. This is equal to the amount one-fourth of Indians (or not less than 250 million) have to survive on for at least three months. India lives in her villages. Right. So said the "father of the nation" Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Though it is still fairly fashionable to quote him, most in the media frankly don't give a damn.
Paranjay Guhathakurta is Director, School of Convergence, International Management Institute, New Delhi