50 Films That Changed Bollywood, 1995-2015

By Shubhra Gupta

Hindi cinema was trapped in formulaic cliches for decades: lost-and-found themes, sacrificing mothers, brothers on opposite sides of the law, villains lording over their dens, colourful molls, six songs, the use of rape as a plot pivot, and cops who always arrived too late. It hit an all-time low in the 1980s. Then, in 1991, came liberalization, and a wave of openness and aspiration swept across urban India. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge was released in 1995 - and Hindi cinema became Bollywood. A new crop of film-makers began to challenge and break away from established rules. Over the next twenty years, a number of Hindi films consistently pushed the envelope in terms of content and technique to create a new kind of cinema. Among other innovations, film-makers came up with ways of crowd funding a film (Ankhon Dekhi), did away with songs if the narrative did not need them (Gangaajal), addressed different sexual preferences (My Brother ... Nikhil) and people with special needs (Black) like no one had ever done before. As film critic with the Indian Express, Shubhra Gupta has stayed the course these twenty years and more and experienced the transition first-hand. In 50 Films That Changed Bollywood, 1995-2015, she looks at the modern classics that have redefined Hindi cinema - from DDLJ and Rangeela to Satya and Dev D to Queen and Bajrangi Bhaijaan. Gupta offers a fascinating glimpse into how these films spoke to their viewers and how the viewers reacted to them - and, ultimately, how they changed us and how we changed them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Dec 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9789351778486

Shubhra Gupta

Shubhra Gupta is film critic and columnist with the Indian Express. Reviewing and critiquing films, and writing on major trends emerging from Indian and international cinema, for over twenty years, she has joined the dots between how we watch our movies and live our lives. One of the most well-regarded, influential film critics in India, she has been a member of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), has travelled to film festivals around the globe and been part of several cinema juries. She received the Ramnath Goenka award for Best Writing on Cinema in 2012.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

When are you going to write a book?

For the longest time I would respond with, ‘When I have something to say,’ and hope that it didn’t sound too feeble. Now I can safely stop dodging this frequently asked question.

The thing is that in the life of a constantly plugged in, card-carrying film critic, there are no full stops. Only commas, semicolons and dashes, and sometimes screeching exclamation marks, created by the films one has to see. Films keep flooding into theatres every week. At least one; most often two or three, or even more. It is a barrage. And then those weeks become months and years. If my reviews say what I have to say about the films, what is left over?

By now, enough. The years that I have spent at the movies have added up to become more than the sum of their parts. The sense of history and context and understanding – of how films are so much more than a series of visuals connected by a plot, how they are made and put out there, how they are received, where they come from and where they go – is sizeable enough to trace the journey of how Bollywood grew in the weeks, months, years that one was watching.

Bollywood’s journey has been mine too.

People often ask me how many films I have seen over the years, helpfully throwing out figures: hundreds, thousands, or more? And I tell them I stopped counting long back. Because watching and learning and growing has been a work in progress for me. Cinema, of all kinds, teaches me to see, and share.

So here it is, finally. The Book. Because I do have something more to say than what I’ve already said, and continue to say, in my weekly reviews and fortnightly columns.

* * *

I began writing on cinema in the early 1990s. It started as a lark, filling in for on-leave film reviewers in the papers I then worked with, or, once, even moonlighting for a rival Sunday paper (the bit of money I got paid was incidental but a welcome addition to my meagre journalist salary!). It was just for a few weeks, but it was enough to make me realize that I enjoyed it more than anything else I was doing at the time. Which was reporting, editing, making pages, just the regular stuff that journalists did while, of course, changing the world.

The film review column you see in The Indian Express today began in the early 1990s, and it has had a continuous run in the paper since then, with practically no breaks (barring the odd week or two). When I began, I also used to write a regular column on television, and it was fascinating to see how disparate and yet how connected these two mediums were, because when it came to grabbing eyeballs, the great glue was cinema: there was nothing more sticky than the Sunday evening movie or Chitrahaar, and all the hundreds of film-based programmes that rolled out when Doordarshan stopped being the only act in town, and satellite channels began sprouting at a breathless pace.

In the last two decades and more, India has changed beyond recognition. Along with everything else, it is evident in our mediascape with its multiplicity of platforms, which we create and consume 24/7, so different from the time when we had one grainy official news channel, a stuffy sarkari radio station and a handful of newspapers minus shiny supplements. That was an India in which Wrigley’s chewing gum and Wrangler jeans, and other ‘foreign’ products, were prized possessions, and we had to hide a few extra greenbacks in our socks on the rare visit abroad because the RBI had strict rules for how much forex we could take with us. We now live in a country whose metros are buried under high-end brands and glitzy malls, Japanese and American SUVs (sports utility vehicles) rule the roads, and foreign travel is a routine, mundane, to-be-taken-for-granted thing.

As a film critic who has stayed the course these twenty years and more, I’ve been a privileged bystander-cum-participant, experiencing the transition first-hand. From mouldering single-screen theatres with rickety seats and unbearably stinky loos to swanky multiplexes with five-star toilets, flatbed seating and valet service. From distributors who ruled their turf with velvet gloves and iron hands to faceless number crunchers. From hands-on exhibitors who would welcome you themselves and order samosas and chai and greasy popcorn to nameless drones controlling things from faraway offices. From producers known for their immense hospitality with their Diwali parties and holi milans to cut-and-dry corporate houses owing allegiance to their Hollywood bosses. From funding which came from private hundis at exorbitant interest rates and dodgy sources to the possibility of ‘clean’ bank loans and collaterals. From films which used to be written as they went along to bound scripts and professionally managed sets. From reviews written on Saturdays which appeared on Sundays to tweeted insta views to films released on Netflix and iTunes … I could go on and on.

In 1991 came liberalization, and India became a different country. In 1995 came Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ), and Hindi cinema became Bollywood.

There have been as many definitions of what Hindi cinema and Bollywood was and is, and the differences between the two, as there have been opinions on the origins of the term ‘Bollywood’, voiced and argued over by eminent scholars and social scientists and other worthies. For me, the changeover came with DDLJ. It was like a distinct click and settling, a ‘Before and After’. The slow transition had begun in the early 1990s, but with this film there was a sense of clear departure; the sense of an ending and a beginning.

Shah Rukh Khan aka SRK, the film’s male star, personified that difference. He was a middle-class Dilli boy who attended a well-known school and a middling college and a postgraduate media course. He romanced a girl next door and married her. He arrived in Bombay with a wife and some friends, and an ambition that was a fire in his eyes. He had done theatre with Barry John and acted in a Doordarshan serial, from which he began gaining popularity, and now he was aiming for the movies.

As a young reporter, I was once assigned to cover a play he was in. I reached Kamani Auditorium, where the group was rehearsing, and there he was, this TV guy on stage. He looked unremarkable at first glance, and then you paused. I remember thinking he looked slighter than he did on TV, but he had that extra something: he caught the light. He was, even back then, a little more visible.

His journey has been documented a million times over, but twenty-five years on, and even after those many iterations, it is as amazing: it reflected the new Indian who had broken free from the socialist era and the licence raj, and the privileged club ruled by unseen hands where you gained entry only because of your birth or by your access to the powerful. SRK made it big on his own steam. Unlike the other two Khans, he is usually (and erroneously) compared with, he did not have old family connections in Bombay. He began with a barely seen Mani Kaul film, and made his first big Bollywood splash astride a motorbike on Marine Drive, singing a song: many people before and after had done the same, but SRK took it and ran with it. And he hasn’t stopped still.

He was one of us, and he is on top. That makes him the ultimate outlier.

DDLJ created a brand of romance which garnished and overlaid individual passion with parental desires in a way Bollywood hadn’t done before. In so doing, SRK reached out to the new-generation Indian, her mum and grandmum, and did the same with the new-generation NRI: he opened his arms and gathered them all in. He was the first Bollywood star whose films spoke to the Indian longing for her own watan, while keeping his own persona intact: that mop, that stutter, that kinetic flutter. Such stars as Raj Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan had sizeable fandom outside the country; SRK broadened that connect immeasurably, and became the first true star whom even the second-generation NRIs adored.

The ‘outsider’ became the ‘insider’, and changed everything.

* * *

In the small dusty UP towns where I had my initial brush with the movies, technicolor Hindi cinema ruled, playing in run-down single-screen theatres that went by the name of Bhagwan, Moti, Heera, Shah, Natraj and so on. They began with the noon show at 12.30 p.m., went on to the matinee at 3.30, the evening at 6.30, and the night show at 9.30. The early show at 9.30 a.m. mostly featured adult movies or some old Hollywood or Soviet film dubbed in Hindi with lots of sweaty love-making scenes, and was frequented by the college-going crowd, almost all male.

Very few Hollywood films came to India those days. They would arrive much later than their release in the West, sometimes after months. They would be greatly anticipated but would always be the occasional indulgence, because there were just so few of them. Clearly, Hollywood was ‘theirs’, to be watched sporadically: Hindi cinema, on the other hand, was ‘ours’. It was ‘mine’. Hindi films, mostly featuring Amitabh Bachchan, were watched with a great deal of noisy enjoyment. Movie-going meant a group outing, jostling for tickets at the tiny window, and drinking sugary colas, and the post-film conversation lasted for days if not weeks.

I changed cities, switched from school to college, but movie-going remained a steady feature of my life. Part of my postgraduate media course was devoted to cinema, and the sudden access to world cinema opened up a dizzying multiverse. I began devouring everything like a maniac: when there was film, what was the need of food? Being able to incessantly watch and read about cinema, with real-life intervening only occasionally, was wonderful. Even more wonderful was the fact that I could turn a full-time passion into a full-time job. I began my regular weekly film-review column soon after, and that moment when I walked into a theatre for the first film I was to review was like coming home. It was not then, and is still not jobbery. It was full-blown romance, and it’s never faded.

When satellite TV began cloning itself furiously and saas-bahu serials became the unshakeable leitmotif of all TV fiction, I got tired of television. But there was no question of boredom with cinema, and especially Hindi cinema with all its maddeningly unique and addictive features, which only those who really like and respect it can fully appreciate.

And then suddenly, just like that, it was twenty years and more since I began. And quite as suddenly, I had reached that crucial tipping point. The point where I could look back on the growth of the film industry and chart how it transitioned from a chaotic, vibrant community of individuals and mom-and-pop shops, to its post-liberalized Bollywood avatar full of fledgling corporate houses, studio-based models, marketing mavens and PR strategists.

I could see the dramatic, sweeping changes, as reflected in the cinema of the time. I could see too how sometimes two steps forward could also mean three steps back, because for every ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ film, there would be a score of backward, regressive ones. I could see how those films spoke to their viewers and how the viewers reacted to them. I could see how those films changed us. And how we changed them.

That’s when the book started taking shape.

The idea was to examine this change by zeroing in on the fifty most influential films of the past twenty years, sifting through every single review of every single (Hindi) film that I’ve seen (well, okay, there are a few films whose records I do not have, whose copies have either been mislaid or have vanished) to choose the films that I think changed things radically, caused a paradigm shift, blazed a trail, reworked the narrative and grammar of film-making, and redefined Bollywood.

These are the films that changed the game in popular, mainstream Bollywood in some manner, caught the zeitgeist in a way not achieved before, influenced film-makers and film-making practices. They may not all have been blockbusters, but they were all significant in the way they impacted the shape and direction of Bollywood after 1995.

The choosing of the films was a tough call. Some were nobrainers and slid easily into place; many others demanded much more deliberation to see if their inclusion could be justified, and the process took several months.

Once I had fixed on the fifty, I watched each film (and about as many more which didn’t make the final cut) all over again, most on DVD, a few on YouTube, to see if the review matched up to my re-experiencing the film. Or, vice versa. Did I feel the same, did I go overboard, was I nasty beyond belief, or was I too hasty in dumping on something, do I feel radically different? Did I damn the film with faint praise? Was I unfair?

What I’ve got is what I hoped I would. My feelings towards the films are constant. I am older. So is the film. Are we still friends or foe? In retrospect, I find I have more context. I have grown more tolerant. With a few (very few) films, I do think I went overboard: revisiting those reviews was cringe-making. But regardless of what I thought (as reflected in the reviews, which is why I have included the original reviews in the book; they provide invaluable context), the films form a mosaic, a map of the biggest film industry in the world, looked at through the eyes of a film critic who was there when they came out first.

* * *

The original reviews are in here. For a harried, always-on-the-go writer, there can be nothing better than having the privilege to borrow from already existing material, especially if that material is your own. The older material is supplemented with the new, in which I’ve attempted to put the film, and its importance, in context. I’ve done a cut-off at 2015; twenty years has a neat ring to it, with a satisfying arc. (Except I’ve cheated, just a little: because we are almost at the end of 2016, I’ve mentioned several breakthrough films of the current year in the volume, and I’ve added one to the fifty; that one is a shagun – I’m sure Bollywood would approve!)

Looking back has helped me see how Bollywood has reached this point and become a gigantic industry which dominates the rest of the film-making centres in the country and continues to forge a distinct identity of its own. Long-time industry watchers, and that includes me, are always having to take refuge in the old cliché: the more things change, the more they remain the same. But I can say with absolute conviction that the Bollywood we know today – full of contradictory impulses, a local–global creature, struggling to find its feet within and without the country, sending out an endless stream of pop cultural signifiers – is only going to get bigger and more influential.

These reviews – which come from a place of no fear, no favour, and which have appeared exactly as I wrote them – could only have been published in The Indian Express. My publishers and editors have always reposed full faith in me, and for that I am enormously thankful: in the PR-mediated times we live in, that trust is beyond rubies.

Some of the film people mentioned in these pages, not always in flattering terms, may have disagreed with my opinion, but we have met with mutual respect; we may be on opposite sides of the spectrum but are united by our love for cinema.

And that’s as it should be. Because movies are us, and we are the movies.

* * *

One of the things I wanted to touch upon briefly is the changing face of Hindi cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s. Only when we get an idea of the ebb and flow of Hindi cinema in the preceding two decades can we appreciate just how radical some of the departures were in the 1990s, as reflected in these fifty films.

That Hindi cinema after 1947 was a crucial part of constructing a post-colonial identity has been well documented. The stakeholders were many and varied, but the beginnings of popular Hindi cinema in independent India were almost uniformly steeped in socially relevant messages and nation-building exercises. Education was the state directive, but soon enough, entertainment forced its way in. Popular cinema learnt to mask didacticism with dollops of escapism in order to appeal to the ‘masses’. Alongside, a tiny space formed for stories emerging from the increasing disenchantment of the disenfranchised, the steady divide created by caste, class and religion. Those films appealed to a niche audience, as they do still, even if the size of the audience has grown bigger, percentage-wise, with the growth in population.

I will take the pass through those early decades, the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and come directly to the ‘significant ’70s’, which is when I first became aware of the enchantment of the screen. It was the decade dominated by the decline of Rajesh Khanna and the rise and rise of Amitabh Bachchan. The former was the flag-bearer of old-style Hindi cinema; the latter the stormy petrel who would lead the Bombay film industry, single-handedly, into a radically new direction.

It was the decade of Bobby. And Zanjeer, Deewaar and Sholay. And Amar Akbar Anthony and Suhaag and Parvarish. And Rampur Ka Lakshman, Bhai Ho Toh Aisa, Aa Gale Lag Jaa, and Roti. And the film that started the trend of the multi-starrer: Yaadon Ki Baaraat. It was also the decade of the Emergency, and those two years, 1975–77, impinged most severely on the freedom of film-makers (as well as other artists) who did not toe the line of the ruling party. India was on the cusp of momentous change, and a period of great ferment – political, social and cultural – was upon us. The country was hurtling towards the point of no return and a definitive loss of innocence.

Hindi cinema was keeping pace. A tall, lanky, unlikely hero with the name of Amitabh Bachchan posted notice of his arrival in not-witnessed-before ways, playing characters filled with restlessness, angst and anger. He was often called Vijay. He did not turn the other cheek. He answered violence with violence. He glowered and growled, taking on a gaggle of goons single-handedly, and we cheered. Bachchan’s ‘Permanently Enraged Young Man’ became a box-office phenomenon, the character becoming mythic even as it played out on screen: in an unusual confluence, the star and his roles (written by Salim–Javed in Zanjeer, Deewaar and Sholay) were seen as a reflection and sublimation of the way the nation was feeling.

In 1971, the family-friendly Haathi Mere Saathi had reigning superstar Rajesh Khanna cosying up to lovable pachyderms and learning life lessons. It was a massive hit. In the next couple of years, Khanna would appear in a series of jubilee hits, earning the sobriquet of superstar. But all too soon, he went from appearing unstoppable to becoming a spent force, ceding his throne to Bachchan in one of the most bitter rivalries in the Bombay film industry.

Haathi Mere Saathi was written by new writer-duo Salim–Javed. Barely two years later, the same scriptwriters delivered the very different Zanjeer. They followed it up with Deewaar, which picked up on the frustration and dissatisfaction sweeping through the country, and created a hero who refused to go gently into the night. Henceforth, Bollywood would be defined as ‘before and after’ Amitabh Bachchan. He became, as a fawning fanzine put it, number one to number ten, and ruled Bollywood: even his bad films – and he did some terrible ones too – made enough money to keep his producers afloat. After honing his angry young man persona in Zanjeer, Deewaar, Trishul, Kala Patthar, and brooding sexily in Sholay, runaway hits all, he executed a quick turnaround to show us that he could do every other thing too, and make us laugh and cry. He could even dance. Amar Akbar Anthony, Suhaag, Hera Pheri, etc., gave us the Omnibus Bachchan: wags said, only half in jest, that he would have played the heroine’s part too, given a chance.

Bachchan became the dominant flavour of the 1970s, especially when he partnered with the inimitable Manmohan Desai: everything the star and director touched turned to gold, and anyone who was a mainstream Hindi movie fan, turned, by default, into a masala fan. For the desi palate, there was nothing like its sizzle-hiss-crackle-splutter.

Masala movies, by definition, were very far from being realistic. We knew that the possibility of ‘bachpan mein bichdey huey teen bhai’ donating blood at the same time to their blind mother was less than zero, but we embraced the concept, willingly suspending disbelief. These were our myths, our movies, for us to obsess over and for us to sing their songs in endless rounds of antakshari, conducted in homes and schools and picnics and offices.

There was another, for lack of a better word, movement which was coming alive during these years when Bachchan was setting the box office on fire. Such stalwarts as Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, Basu Chatterjee and Basu Bhattacharya, the proponents of the middle-of-the-road cinema, were making films on middle-class urban characters and their concerns. And for those who scoffed at masala, a ‘parallel’ cinema was emerging. Film-makers like Shyam Benegal, Ketan Mehta, Govind Nihalani and a few others were crafting a new cinematic language on the bedrock of ‘social realism’.

This cinema took its cues from the prevailing high degree of social unrest which had started to reflect regularly in the national press. Around the same time, newly minted actors from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, were heading to the Bombay film industry in search of work. Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Anant Nag, Girish Karnad, Amrish Puri, Amol Palekar formed the talent pool which these directors dipped into for groundbreaking films like Ankur, Nishant, Holi, Mirch Masala, Bhavni Bhavai, Paar and several others.

It was a heady efflorescence. Brilliant films came out of it, reflecting the savage divide created by class, caste, religion, showing us an India we hadn’t seen in the movies before, or at least not with this frequency and efficacy. To seriously delve into the cinema of that tumultuous period would require a whole new book, or several. Suffice it to say that socially aware themes, occasionally visible as throwaway strands in the odd populist work, which had mostly got buried under the layers of escapism, found a welcome state-supported resurgence.

Then came the 1980s, which I think are unjustly pilloried, and remembered unfairly as the years Hindi cinema would like to forget. As was the case with other decades, there was some gold to be found in the dross. I think of it as the decade that connected the significant ’70s and the sanskari ’90s, the decade in which film-makers struggled to find new meaning and idiom to retain the faithful. It was the in-between decade which gave us some memorable films from all three streams – mainstream, middle-of-the-road and art-house – each distinct from the other.

Mainstream cinema was bookended by youthful romance: Ek Duje Ke Liye, Love Story in 1980–81 and Chandni, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Maine Pyar Kiya in 1988–89. In the intervening years, there was every kind of film. Shekhar Kapur came up with Mr. India and Masoom, Subhash Ghai with Hero and Karz, N. Chandra with Tezaab, Rahul Rawail with Arjun, Betaab and Dacait, Pankaj Parashar with Chaalbaaz: some of these are flavourful, happy-making still.

The first half of the decade saw some superb middle-of-the-road cinema, with such films as Chashme Buddoor, Arth, Angoor, Namkeen, Katha, Ek Pal, New Delhi Times, Main Azaad Hoon, Saath Saath: films that were peopled by middle-class characters for the audiences which wanted realistic entertainment, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Bhattacharya, Sai Paranjpye, Gulzar, Raman Kumar, Ramesh Sharma and a few others. Again, some of these films have travelled well, and still make for solid viewing, not just as fodder for nostalgia buffs.

And the ‘parallel movement’ came up with some of its best in Ardh Satya, Akrosh, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, Mandi, Kalyug, Party, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Yeh Woh Manzil Toh Nahin, and the completely insane universe of Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar. These were startlingly new, taking us into spaces Hindi cinema hadn’t ventured before, and are still eminently worthy of our time – the last a cult classic which is rediscovered with much joy every passing year.

Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth, which redefined the meaning of marriage and fidelity, is still remembered as a definitive 1980s film. As is Mira Nair’s Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay which took us into the world of slum children and their environment years before Danny Boyle did. But most of these films (with the exception of Arth, which was a hit) were considered fringe, and became recognized for what they were post facto because they did not have enough box-office might. The ’80s are remembered most for the decade in which Bachchan slid from pole position: from Kaalia, Khuddar, Laawaris, Satte Pe Satta, Namak Halaal, Coolie, Sharaabi, where he was holding on but spreading himself thin, he went, after 1985, into a series of no-hopers like Gangaa Jamunaa Saraswathi, Toofan and Jaadugar.

The ’80s also saw new stars – Kumar Gaurav, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol, Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff – buffing up the mainstream space but they could not dislodge Bachchan: despite his duds, he was still decisively on top. The other big tickets were the leftovers from the 1970s; Jeetendra, with his southern hits like Tohfa and Himmatwala, and Mithun Chakraborty and his Disco Dancer and Dance Dance. Some others like Rishi Kapoor, who had also crossed over from the ’70s, were clinging on, but the failure of Ramesh Sippy’s Sagar which teamed him with his Bobby co-star Dimple Kapadia, is an indelible 1980s memory.

More than anything else, it was the advent of the VCR (video cassette recorder) and colour TV which killed the movies in the 1980s. The middle classes, which had always used cinema as the primary mode of entertainment, deserted theatres. Home became the site of film viewing. With family audiences deserting the theatres, film-makers trained their sights on the lowest common denominator. Films became an exercise in gratuitous violence and tasteless sex, addressing the frontbencher to the exclusion of all else. That is the memory of the ’80s – sex-and-violence-laden drivel – which has endured.

And then, it was time for the 1990s. For movies to be