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Log inHindustani's Deccan Hub: How Bombay made Hindi a heroine
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Hindustani's Deccan Hub: How Bombay made Hindi a heroine
by Guest Tue Nov 13, 2012 2:29 pm
In an earlier column I had suggested that Bombay’s pre-eminence as the Indian metropolis and its ability to appeal to a pan-Indian imagination was bound up with the fact that its linguistic culture wasn’t regionally defined. Through a series of historical accidents, Bombay, despite its peninsular location, adopted a pidgin Hindustani as its lingua franca.
The process by which this happened awaits its historian. It would be interesting to explore the connection between the migration of labour to Bombay in its capacity as India’s industrial hub and the growing currency of this patois. It would also be useful to know when this mongrel dialect achieved critical mass.
We do, however, know one remarkable fact: historically, before Bombay became the epicentre of Hindi cinema in India, it had already established itself as the beating heart of the subcontinent’s commercial Hindustani theatre. Remarkably, this Deccan port, a thousand miles from heartland of Hindi-speaking India, remained the hub of both commercial Hindustani drama and commercial Hindi cinema for a hundred-and-fifty years. It’s not a coincidence that India’s most successful repertory theatre and its most profitable film industry were both incubated in Bombay and that the medium for both was Hindustani.
Bombay’s history brought this about in two ways. As one of the principal sites of colonial rule in India, the city hosted English stage plays in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries which helped create a hybrid commercial theatre that drew on both European and Indian theatrical traditions. But this wasn’t unique to Bombay; the same could be said of Calcutta. What was peculiar to Bombay was the presence of a merchant elite from elsewhere that was willing to experiment with commercial drama in any language that would fetch a return. Parsi theatre happened in Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu and even English, but given the currency of forms of Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani in northern and even some southern cities, it was a cheerful and robust Hindustani that found it the largest audience.
And while the Parsi theatre as a mobile repertory form wasn’t confined to Bombay, it is in Bombay that many of the major companies were centred. It was Bombay that provided much of the entrepreneurship, and many of the patrons, financiers, managers and performers who helped the Parsi theatre create the largest ticket-buying audience in Indian stage history.
Bombay’s talkies took over where the Parsi theatre left off: it was like a relay, complete with baton change: the Parsi theatre lived on till the early 1930s when the talkies became popular, whereupon the repertory companies folded, the theatres became cinema halls and the capital that sustained the Parsi theatre shifted to financing movie studios. Parsi capital sustained at least three major studios — Imperial Film, Minerva Movietone, Wadia Movietone — and one distribution network, the Madan Theatres.
Effectively, Bombay became the heart of a popular, pan-Indian money-making theatrical tradition in the mid-19th century and sustained that leadership when the tradition switched forms, from the talking, singing, dancing stage production to the talking, singing, dancing movie. A large part of Bombay’s cosmopolitanism, its promise, its ability to define a modern Indian hedonism was connected to its ownership of an Indian dream machine that spun its fantasies in a pan-Indian urban dialect, as well as its casual embrace of a bazari Hindustani as its lingua franca. This pidgin never became a creole; it never became the native language of any speech community, but it flourished as a transactional language spoken by hoods, policemen, merchants, netas, even the posh of Peddar Road when they spoke to their servants and chauffeurs. Its existence made traffic in one language between socially unequal and linguistically diverse people possible in real life and plausible in the movies.
The Bombay film industry showed us that there was a way of being rich, poor, lumpen, Muslim, Khatri and Pathan in Hindustani. You could play out your Tamilness, your Sindhiness, your Bengaliness, your Sardarness in this stretchable tongue. There are recognizable speech rules for being Goan or Punjabi or Madrasi in Bombay’s pidgin. These are rules drawn from Hindi cinema’s Guide to Coarse Acting, but they allow its films to gesture at India. This is a necessary capability for any form that wants to be considered pan-Indian entertainment, the ability to represent a diverse country in one language because stories can’t practically be told in two. Just as the Parsi theatre had done, Bombay’s film industry, regardless of the native languages of its personnel, chose the language that had both the all-India audience and the rhetorical breadth to attempt the task of embodying India.
Paradoxically, the fact that Bombay was not part of the Hindi heartland, made a commercial Hindi cinema based in Bombay possible. For a successful film industry, it was essential that Hindi be used instrumentally, with both eyes on the box office. This isn’t to say that Hindi cinema was scripted in some crass, commercial pidgin, it wasn’t. The stories, the songs, the dialogue that animated Bombay’s films were written for decades by some of the most gifted poets and writers in Urdu. It is merely to point out that a commercial cinema needs to be able to use what works commercially without any concern for cultural purity or linguistic propriety or ideological rectitude.
You could even argue that the Hindi film industry would not have flourished in a city of the Hindi heartland — and not only because of the economic backwardness of these cities. Even if all other things were assumed to be equal, the sense of literary and cultural ownership that characterizes Hindiwallahs, their ideologically driven sense of being Hindi’s custodians, would have ruled out the vulgarity, the eclectic idiom, the dhanda-driven dialects of Bombay’s Hindi cinema.
And this is not merely speculation. You only have to look at the venomous critique of the Parsi theatre mounted by the guardians of Hindi in the 19th century to anticipate what their 20th-century counterparts would have done to Hindi cinema. Bharatendu Harishchandra’s strictures on a Parsi theatre production of Kalidasa’s Sakuntalam in Banaras, list the performance’s disregard for the classical unities of time and place, for ‘authenticity’, for the dangers of anachronism. These Parsi theatre- wallahs had no conception of deshkaal, he wrote scornfully, their pronunciation of words derived from the Sanskrit was appalling and he wished they’d stop dabbling in Hindi theatre. The first director-general of All India Radio was appalled by the mongrel nature of Hindi film songs in exactly the same way; in a move that would have warmed the heart of Bharatendu, he banned their broadcast on Akashvani. (As always, Hindi cinema found a commercial outlet in Radio Ceylon.)
Bombay was the perfect setting for Hindi cinema because no one in Bombay was invested in Hindi high culture, or shudh Hindi or indeed in Hindi at all. The Bombay film industry used its approximations of Hindustani because they worked at the box office. It used an idiom closer to Urdu than Hindi for several reasons: Urdu’s metaphorical extravagance suited the purposes of stylized melodrama, Urdu’s history as a language of administration and official discourse gave it a plausible and credible idiom in which to render public context: the court-room scene is a case in point.
The producers of Bombay’s Hindi cinema were free to use Hindustani in whichever way they wanted because the Hindi cinema needed neither subsidy nor government patronage and also because Bombay’s distance from Hindi’s heartland protected them from the zealots who took charge of Hindi with the founding of the republic, cultural commissars who would have had dialogue writers replace dil with hriday and khoon with rakt. A Hindi film industry located in the heartland would have produced either popular dialect films (like the Bhojpuri film industry today) or solemn new-wave type films with Sanskritized titles like Aadharshila and Aakrosh and Ardh Satya. These might have gone on to win critical acclaim but they would not have created a pan-Indian audience, nor spun pan-Indian dreams.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100610/jsp/opinion/story_12545872.jsp
The process by which this happened awaits its historian. It would be interesting to explore the connection between the migration of labour to Bombay in its capacity as India’s industrial hub and the growing currency of this patois. It would also be useful to know when this mongrel dialect achieved critical mass.
We do, however, know one remarkable fact: historically, before Bombay became the epicentre of Hindi cinema in India, it had already established itself as the beating heart of the subcontinent’s commercial Hindustani theatre. Remarkably, this Deccan port, a thousand miles from heartland of Hindi-speaking India, remained the hub of both commercial Hindustani drama and commercial Hindi cinema for a hundred-and-fifty years. It’s not a coincidence that India’s most successful repertory theatre and its most profitable film industry were both incubated in Bombay and that the medium for both was Hindustani.
Bombay’s history brought this about in two ways. As one of the principal sites of colonial rule in India, the city hosted English stage plays in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries which helped create a hybrid commercial theatre that drew on both European and Indian theatrical traditions. But this wasn’t unique to Bombay; the same could be said of Calcutta. What was peculiar to Bombay was the presence of a merchant elite from elsewhere that was willing to experiment with commercial drama in any language that would fetch a return. Parsi theatre happened in Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu and even English, but given the currency of forms of Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani in northern and even some southern cities, it was a cheerful and robust Hindustani that found it the largest audience.
And while the Parsi theatre as a mobile repertory form wasn’t confined to Bombay, it is in Bombay that many of the major companies were centred. It was Bombay that provided much of the entrepreneurship, and many of the patrons, financiers, managers and performers who helped the Parsi theatre create the largest ticket-buying audience in Indian stage history.
Bombay’s talkies took over where the Parsi theatre left off: it was like a relay, complete with baton change: the Parsi theatre lived on till the early 1930s when the talkies became popular, whereupon the repertory companies folded, the theatres became cinema halls and the capital that sustained the Parsi theatre shifted to financing movie studios. Parsi capital sustained at least three major studios — Imperial Film, Minerva Movietone, Wadia Movietone — and one distribution network, the Madan Theatres.
Effectively, Bombay became the heart of a popular, pan-Indian money-making theatrical tradition in the mid-19th century and sustained that leadership when the tradition switched forms, from the talking, singing, dancing stage production to the talking, singing, dancing movie. A large part of Bombay’s cosmopolitanism, its promise, its ability to define a modern Indian hedonism was connected to its ownership of an Indian dream machine that spun its fantasies in a pan-Indian urban dialect, as well as its casual embrace of a bazari Hindustani as its lingua franca. This pidgin never became a creole; it never became the native language of any speech community, but it flourished as a transactional language spoken by hoods, policemen, merchants, netas, even the posh of Peddar Road when they spoke to their servants and chauffeurs. Its existence made traffic in one language between socially unequal and linguistically diverse people possible in real life and plausible in the movies.
The Bombay film industry showed us that there was a way of being rich, poor, lumpen, Muslim, Khatri and Pathan in Hindustani. You could play out your Tamilness, your Sindhiness, your Bengaliness, your Sardarness in this stretchable tongue. There are recognizable speech rules for being Goan or Punjabi or Madrasi in Bombay’s pidgin. These are rules drawn from Hindi cinema’s Guide to Coarse Acting, but they allow its films to gesture at India. This is a necessary capability for any form that wants to be considered pan-Indian entertainment, the ability to represent a diverse country in one language because stories can’t practically be told in two. Just as the Parsi theatre had done, Bombay’s film industry, regardless of the native languages of its personnel, chose the language that had both the all-India audience and the rhetorical breadth to attempt the task of embodying India.
Paradoxically, the fact that Bombay was not part of the Hindi heartland, made a commercial Hindi cinema based in Bombay possible. For a successful film industry, it was essential that Hindi be used instrumentally, with both eyes on the box office. This isn’t to say that Hindi cinema was scripted in some crass, commercial pidgin, it wasn’t. The stories, the songs, the dialogue that animated Bombay’s films were written for decades by some of the most gifted poets and writers in Urdu. It is merely to point out that a commercial cinema needs to be able to use what works commercially without any concern for cultural purity or linguistic propriety or ideological rectitude.
You could even argue that the Hindi film industry would not have flourished in a city of the Hindi heartland — and not only because of the economic backwardness of these cities. Even if all other things were assumed to be equal, the sense of literary and cultural ownership that characterizes Hindiwallahs, their ideologically driven sense of being Hindi’s custodians, would have ruled out the vulgarity, the eclectic idiom, the dhanda-driven dialects of Bombay’s Hindi cinema.
And this is not merely speculation. You only have to look at the venomous critique of the Parsi theatre mounted by the guardians of Hindi in the 19th century to anticipate what their 20th-century counterparts would have done to Hindi cinema. Bharatendu Harishchandra’s strictures on a Parsi theatre production of Kalidasa’s Sakuntalam in Banaras, list the performance’s disregard for the classical unities of time and place, for ‘authenticity’, for the dangers of anachronism. These Parsi theatre- wallahs had no conception of deshkaal, he wrote scornfully, their pronunciation of words derived from the Sanskrit was appalling and he wished they’d stop dabbling in Hindi theatre. The first director-general of All India Radio was appalled by the mongrel nature of Hindi film songs in exactly the same way; in a move that would have warmed the heart of Bharatendu, he banned their broadcast on Akashvani. (As always, Hindi cinema found a commercial outlet in Radio Ceylon.)
Bombay was the perfect setting for Hindi cinema because no one in Bombay was invested in Hindi high culture, or shudh Hindi or indeed in Hindi at all. The Bombay film industry used its approximations of Hindustani because they worked at the box office. It used an idiom closer to Urdu than Hindi for several reasons: Urdu’s metaphorical extravagance suited the purposes of stylized melodrama, Urdu’s history as a language of administration and official discourse gave it a plausible and credible idiom in which to render public context: the court-room scene is a case in point.
The producers of Bombay’s Hindi cinema were free to use Hindustani in whichever way they wanted because the Hindi cinema needed neither subsidy nor government patronage and also because Bombay’s distance from Hindi’s heartland protected them from the zealots who took charge of Hindi with the founding of the republic, cultural commissars who would have had dialogue writers replace dil with hriday and khoon with rakt. A Hindi film industry located in the heartland would have produced either popular dialect films (like the Bhojpuri film industry today) or solemn new-wave type films with Sanskritized titles like Aadharshila and Aakrosh and Ardh Satya. These might have gone on to win critical acclaim but they would not have created a pan-Indian audience, nor spun pan-Indian dreams.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100610/jsp/opinion/story_12545872.jsp
Guest- Guest
Re: Hindustani's Deccan Hub: How Bombay made Hindi a heroine
by Guest Sat Jan 05, 2013 12:30 pm
Max, this is for you.
Guest- Guest
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