A Gandhian Affair: India's Curious Portrayal of Love in Cinema

By Sanjay Suri

Hindi cinema, ever since Independence, has revolved almost entirely around issues of sex and money. This may seem odd given the conservative taste of the times. But that we do not 'see' sex does not hide just how much sex there is in the cinema. As for money, a nagging theme is the impact of money - or the lack of it - on sex. Sanjay Suri argues that Hindi cinema was an unlikely offspring of the Father of the Nation - the product of Gandhi's celibacy and austerity. His heroic retreat from wealth and sexuality was written into the cinema and then elaborately filmed shot by shot. Suri draws on numerous examples - from Mother India to Do Bigha Zameen; Shree 420 to Pyaasa; Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam to Guide; and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge to Lage Raho Munnabhai - to show how cinema was made within well-defined moral fences that were built with dos and don'ts about sex and money. A Gandhian Affair is a history of India through the preoccupations of its cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jul 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353570811

Sanjay Suri

Sanjay Suri has been a London-based journalist since 1990. He studied at Delhi University and the London School of Economics. He is the author of Brideless in Wembley, Naked Rain and Other Poems and 1984: The Anti-Sikh Violence and After.

Book preview

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special appearance: mahatma gandhi

Those were formula films – seen one, you’ve seen them all. You know the end at the start. No great loss if you turned up late or left early. Or took a stroll through a song. We’ve all heard this, we’ve said it, we’ve seen it. And never mind why these films were the way they were; that just was the way it was. It was the way of those Hindi films coming out of Bombay in the late 1940s, the ’50s, the ’60s, at least into the ’70s and in some ways and for some time later too.

In what made them alike, these films were different from any other cinema being produced around the world, though perhaps not very different from other cinema in India. The very use of the plural in saying ‘these films’ does presuppose a collective bound by a likeness amongst them and a distinction from others, at least in common perception. Hollywood wasn’t making such films, certainly, nor European or Latin American cinema, or Japanese, or cinema around Asia. The Arab world and Africa watched these films hugely but didn’t produce anything quite like this. No one around the world was doing what Bombay was doing, and repeating.

So this formula should be obvious to spot, supposedly. Is it this: boy meets girl, they fall in love, sing a few songs and, past a little trouble from family and a little more from villain, marry to live happily ever after the film ends? But this has always been the formula for love stories around the world – other than the songs. Certainly, lovers in world cinema don’t break out into song nearly as often as they do in Indian cinema. World cinema produces the odd musical, India the odd film that is not a musical.

The serial eruption of song from story is certainly distinctive. But the commonness among these films that makes of them a formula is surely more than the fact of an extraordinarily high song population. The formula is in the story, and if these stories are collectively distinct from the archetypal story of lovers creasing away troubles on the way to marriage, there must be something to these stories that makes them together different from the classic love story. The stories of this cinema look different and feel different.

This otherness of theirs arises from a curious fact. In fact, from a curiously double fact. One, the hero must mandatorily be shown to face wealth and then to turn away from it. And two, he must be shown to face sexual possibilities and to turn away from those too. The hero, and every hero in just about every film over generations of this cinema, must do this. Every hero does this, and in the doing of this lies his heroism. There is no heroism that the stories of this cinema produce that is other than this.

Abandonment of either of these desires is not a choice the hero is given, which is to say that the hero must always and does always choose to abandon both, and not just one, and the abandonment of both feels as one. It is in this twin retreat from both sex and wealth that lies the uniqueness of the repetition within this cinema in relation to any other. It is this that is the stuff of the formula. No other cinema, no other spell of literature anywhere presents such a continual carriage of these values, at such length, to mark a character out as a hero.

It’s a curious portrayal because outside of the cinema, out on the street, pursuit of sex and pursuit of money seem to drive most men most of the time. To do and to achieve is considered commonly the way of the winner, and the classic fictional hero is a winner even if not in any unchallenged trajectory. He isn’t a hero because he gives up. The hero of this cinema is compulsively sacrificial of what he seeks most. His is a moral heroism that in this cinema of the Bombay of then (hard not to call it Bollywood retrospectively) is a morality of giving up what and who he wants.

The continuation of these heroic ways could not have lasted that long as any one-way offering; it expressed necessarily an agreed pact. This was a personal agreement between a film as a particular projection and a necessarily personal viewing of it even if in public space. Everyone who stepped into a cinema hall knew the kind of thing they were getting into – these were formula films, weren’t they? This was going to be a new presentation of the old. You were looking for the new faces and songs and stories, but not with so much resistance to the older stuff in new shape that you wouldn’t see the film at all. These personal transactions added up to the biggest public agreement of the time – the audiences had a taste for the kind of thing they knew the producers prepared; neither or both came first. When audiences shared the narrative, they shaped it.

How did so much cinema over so long manage to get the hero to turn away from what men among the audiences likely turned to most? Men who clearly did not think themselves villainous for having those desires? Instinct and ideals seem to have stood as opposing pulls. Audiences were no doubt pulled by their desiring instincts in their everyday lives; in cinema, it was the ideals that they were invited to identify with – through the length of the film, in any case.

The film-going public, and that was massive even if it wasn’t everyone, spoke of the formula film, and then queued up to watch the next. Was this because nothing better was on offer, or because they had nothing better to do? Repeat viewings of the best of these films wouldn’t suggest so – conversations on how many times you’d seen the most successful of these films were routine. And the most successful films were made with the same formula. The formula became what it was because producers figured it sold.

Cinema projected that twin ideal because audiences held it to be theirs too. On screen, if the hero were to turn to money and sex, he’d be the villain. A quest for both of these defines villainy, just as a rejection of the two identifies heroism. The hero was never rich – he simply could not afford to be. Out in public space in parallel, the approved ideal was against the acquisition of wealth. Anyone who made a profit was called a profiteer. It would be another couple of generations into Manmohan Singh’s economically liberalizing India before the Indian film hero, and not just the actor playing his role, would come into money. That change would come on screen when the public ideals on the street began to do away with guilt over wealth.

Together with acquisition of wealth, sex was publicly held to be a bad thing, other than assumed sex within marriage. Together with that again, cinema was beaming publicly shared morals. Through this period well into the ’70s, the hero never gives in to sexual temptation with either the good woman or the bad one. The protagonist always gets a chance to do as a man what he won’t as a hero. And temptations there always are. This is not a cinema where sex might be conservatively erased out. Sex arises in just about every film because the hero must be given temptations to then turn away from. The poor hero abstains from sex, the film does not. Everyone wanted more money and sex, and everyone went to cinema to see how bad their want was. To seek was a personal need, to shun the public ideal.

Could it be coincidence that these ideals that drove the hero were the very two qualities most commonly associated with Mahatma Gandhi? The ways of Gandhi the man had become synonymous with an embrace of poverty, and of a struggle to rise above sexual temptation. A separation of those morals from those of the biggest fictional projection of the time was hardly to be expected. There wasn’t a man who towered quite as tall as Gandhi did over the Indian landscape at the time, over the landscape of Indian minds: evidence of that was everywhere. Gandhi was the Indian hero that Indians connected most with even if some disagreed with many of his ways. The other hero standing high on the landscape of minds was the film hero. We see both the actual and the fictional heroes driven by the same values.

It may seem unlikely, to put it mildly, to suggest commonness between Gandhi and the film hero. Dev Anand didn’t quite look like Gandhi; and when did Gandhi sing songs in circles around trees with his eyes on a woman squeezed into a tight salwar-kameez? It would be worrying to contemplate the box office fate of love stories that might have some Gandhi lookalike as hero. But see what Dev Anand, or any other, does through the course of a story when confronted with choices over money and sex. He makes choices inevitably that are one with the kind of morals over sex and money most associated with Gandhi. It is those choices the hero is scripted to make at pivotal moments which turn the plot that then gives this cinema the stuff of sameness we see. It becomes in scripted character for all heroes to act in line with Gandhian morals.

The hero appears as conqueror, not of lands and people but of his own desires. Or, he is free enough of desires to be naturally unmindful of them. When he conquers his own desires over the run of the film, he is hero. When he gets active at last to sock it to the bad one, he is a chap winding up a plot but also delivering a symbolic blow to the one who was bad because he had sought or had sex, sought or had wealth.

These ideals flow seamlessly between screen and street. On the rare occasions the hero falls from these ideals, he must suffer for it. The principle is clear: if you wanted sex, you were bad; if you were doing it, you were immoral; if you’d done it, you were guilty. Sex outside of marriage, that is; within marriage, it was apparently considered so boring as to have been made invisible. So it was within the world of the audiences. The same ideals became the standard for people to judge others by – no one presumably minded a little more sex for themselves. None among the audiences, or among the producers for that matter, stopped wanting money either. But on screen, again, making money and owning wealth were seen as bad and were so projected, and so projected on and on.

Why would so many producers, in the business for the money more than anything else, want to risk offering a product that their consumers had been given repeatedly before? Could all of them over a generation do no better than think up variations of just one story? That inescapable quality of sameness we see through this cinema springs more from the overwhelming overhang of these values upon the hero than from any barrenness of creativity. Producers of thousands of films over generations had not all become too similarly dull to find themselves incapable of thinking of anything creatively beyond this one single, or one twin, idea. They just couldn’t think outside of the adopted framework of Gandhi-given morality.

The films were produced by the Chopras and Kapoors of the day, but Gandhi, through the spell of his ideas, set down the framework for those productions. Those ideas were out there all over in India’s social and political landscape. Cinema picked up those values and beamed them right back at its audiences. No sex please, we’re Indian, and no money either. That would be the ideal anyway.

This cinema stands as an extraordinary record of a conflict between the ideal and conduct that fell necessarily short of it. Newspapers and documentation can at best string together a record of occurrences. They can document incidents, record events, list numbers. They could cover meetings held on 2 October and 30 January to mark Gandhi’s birth and death anniversaries. It took this cinema to tell us just how much Gandhi had come to own the space of ideals – not even love stories could find a life away from them. Here, in this cinema, we have the most visible pointer there is to how people thought and how they felt, or how they thought they should think and feel. The offered ideal stood as the standard of what people should conquer but perhaps can’t. This pattern, you might even say, offered us a glimpse of an inner conflict in independent India where everyone paid public homage to Gandhian ideals but themselves headed in a quite different direction.

The hero certainly was headed in the direction of tripping himself up somehow so that he may then lose what he desires. Songs aside, as we will see, the hero will strive to give up both wealth and sex for all sorts of reasons – for the sake of a friend to whom he feels obliged, for family, or just out of poverty because the good woman deserves better than a poor man. These are love stories of short-circuiting one’s own love story. This self-tripping recalls Gandhi’s own life story of evolving out of romantic and sexual love towards a state where a cause greater than one’s own takes over. It’s entirely Gandhian for the hero to believe that sexual gratification must invite guilt. He is Gandhian in seeking for the have-nots; it is Gandhian to struggle for others and to surrender the wishes of the self. In all these stories, the hero gives up and even gives away what he really wants for himself.

The plot of the typical film pulls the hero back from desire towards duty in a peculiar way – he expresses want and then limits it. Plot after plot is written along the tension between the pull of romantic love and the counter-pull of duty. Villain turns up to thwart his love, but hero outdoes him by far in sabotaging his love himself.

Again and again the hero offers to surrender the woman he loves to his best friend (Sangam, Chaudhvin ka Chand). The offered transfer is not in itself heroic; the friend is only a launch pad to spring the hero into sacrificial mode. The plot doesn’t always offer a ready friend; it can be enough for the hero to announce he’s not good enough, not rich enough. He follows up an expression of sacrificial sentiment to fight with prolonged determination to not have the woman he wants and who invariably wants him. This is no direct copy of any perception of Gandhi; this is only what happens when you import a Gandhian abandonment of desire into a love story. The wanting is romantic, the abandonment of want heroic. Dragging romance into self-induced suicide is surely nobody’s standard idea of a love story, but in this cinema this becomes the standard love story. This language of self-defeating love is not just common, it runs all through this cinema. It’s an oddity that becomes the norm and, in that, this idea parallels the song that soars up from the story from nowhere – odd when you think of it but so common that we don’t think of it.

Our hero does not discriminate between desire for the good woman and desire for the bad woman; desire itself is bad. His plotted inaction evokes the enduring image of Gandhi sleeping in between his nieces to triumph over temptation, whatever the facts of that might be. The legacy of Gandhi walks right into the hero’s choices when it matters. If we don’t always think of that oneness straightaway, it’s because the heroes are such dashing-looking chaps. The cinematic sight of a handsome hero’s indifference to a dancer’s hips is without doubt visually more appealing than visions of Gandhi among his nieces.

For Gandhi, beating such temptation became an experiment well before his nieces were thought to have stepped up. At the Phoenix ashram in South Africa, Gandhi arranged for women and men to sleep close together to then do nothing so that desire could then be conquered. Segregation wouldn’t do; that would only be denial dictated by space. It could not test the will to conquer desire that restraint in proximity would enable. These films always create proximity to then demonstrate restraint. You can’t win till you’re tested; our hero just gets tested in more viewer-friendly ways. The hero will do all sorts of things except give in; he puts friendship above love, family above love, nation above love, service to others above love – all in love stories. His is the heroism of wanting love and believing in better than love.

Short Cut

The Gandhi who is invoked in this cinema is not the Gandhi as researched by the assiduous biographer, or as interpreted and disputed among his many assiduous biographers. The idea of Gandhi in this cinema is the core extract of popular ideas about Gandhi – not of the man himself in all his incredible complexities that all who knew him and later his biographers struggled to unravel. A single sentence could carry this popular biography: ‘a secular leader in khadi who gave up wealth and sex and took the political path of non-violence successfully’. Along the way this line would get a twist here, a turn there.

The one-line biography appears to have been good enough for cinema to have tapped into both his political and personal space, though with Gandhi the two were more often than not inseparable. A lived out oneness with the poor was no doubt personally felt and personally expressed but it spoke also his understanding of the socialist principle. He needed state policy to embrace the poor as he personally had – his was an emotional socialism. The humane way sits at the root of socialism; with Gandhi it was right on top. His was the sort of socialism that moves the hero, and it perhaps was this sort of felt socialism that moved people more than the structured socialism of the Nehru kind, even if it ended up doing less.

Ideas and ideals associated with Gandhi and Nehru were cousinly but distinct. Nehru and Gandhi both became icons of India’s political Independence in somewhat different ways through the Independence struggle. Independence gave them both stature that cast shadows in differing directions. Nehru came to be the flag-bearer of a socialism expressed through government; he led India in primarily but not entirely socialist ways for seventeen years as prime minister from Independence. Gandhi’s socialism wanted a less compromised prioritizing of the poor. But it came mixed inseparably with moral colours beyond the political and the social, or even formally socialist. Gandhi’s name became a synonym for celibacy, for strength in sacrifice, for a moral heroism arising from giving up the worldly. Nehru’s was never the way of a lived-out oneness with the poor, nor by all accounts of any sexual abstinence. Nehru could never be a mahatma, Gandhi was.

Gandhi’s blend of celibacy and socialism carries straight over to the hero of this cinema. The hero is poor or does for the poor, and doesn’t do. This non-alcoholic cocktail is peculiarly Gandhi’s to have handed over. Had we been looking at a purely socialist influence on this cinema away from Gandhi, heroic abandonment of greed for money would be a little easier to understand as the socialist ideal against unequal acquisition. But why would socialism hold hands with celibacy to stop the hero from loving and wanting? When did Marx ever link those two? Or Lenin?

The hero-lover’s retreat from the loved one, if driven only by moral principles against undue wealth, could have been prompted by the socialist principle. But that morality in this cinema is one with a retreat from sexual desire. It’s the coupling of the two moralities that’s Gandhian. It’s this that gives all of this cinema a character of socialism with a Gandhian stamp. It arises from a belief inherited clearly from Gandhi that a man – hero, that is – has principles to uphold that pursuit of a woman would compromise – even in the love stories that these are. Principle must conflict with desire, and win.

The socialist call to give up acquisition and think of others overlaps with abandonment of sexual desire and often love itself. Cinema blended the two – in just the way Gandhi had. The principle of giving up undue wealth inherent in socialist thought becomes uniquely if illogically one with the moral position of giving up desire that is fundamentally sexual; the surrender of one feels like the surrender of the other. The connection is not logical, but this was Gandhi. This does not just happen in film after film – film after film is about the happening of this.

This shadow fell over cinema at the time, after all, when Gandhi had risen to heights that made of him a living legend. Over a long spell before this post-independence phase, the hero had not thought it heroic to shy away from temptation. He wanted and he did; he was a man of action. The Homi Wadia hero was a winner, in line with the classic hero. Only under the spell of Gandhi that soared with Independence does the popular hero begin to turn his back on his own desire. Only then does surrender of wealth and desire become heroic.

The Homi Wadia films and their like remained – evolution does not permit guillotines. But those productions slipped rapidly to the periphery. The brave exploits of the hero and of his fearless woman (Fearless Nadia) retreated into a sideshow run from outdated projectors in tacky halls. Cinema under the Gandhian influence obliterated the very idea of the Wadia hero as heroic. Who saw Dhoomketu, Hanuman Patal Vijay and Zimbo? If anyone did, who recalls them? The unknown heroes of these films had been cast as too one-dimensionally heroic to have a chance.

The Gandhi summoned into this cinema appears a hugely simple caricature of historical complexity. This extracted essence necessarily lost much in relation to the actual. But it also intensified the perceived essence. The summary magnified those qualities and extended them into longevity. This unsophisticated idea of Gandhi lacked granularity but gave it currency; it got to the heart of the Gandhi idea. A long run of Gandhi biographies contest all manner of detail of his politics and his sexuality, his political strategies and his ground-level views on the economy. But the simple street biography that informed the screen endures. Biographies don’t fit a sentence, but a sentence can carry a legend. It certainly carried the Gandhi legend through generations of Bollywood.

Cinema compromised; how could it not? The Gandhi idea itself was more inspirational than precise; the Nehru way did not sit in entirely simple separation. The presentation of mandatory poverty itself was compromised and perhaps had to be. A romantic hero needs some dash, and that takes at least a little money. Stories found a way of keeping the hero poor but giving him enough money for some style. He was turned into a borrower or even temporary thief driven by dire circumstance. That gave him a submerged goodness to reclaim. It gave cinema a hero with a westernized look while keeping him reassuringly poor. Or, the stories got a rich hero to become poor. He could then still keep his clothes and look good on camera. It was good enough to be just relatively poor and speak accusingly of the rich.

A show of dire poverty would present a wronged man at the weaker end of heroism. The greater heroism lay in giving up, not in never having had anything at all. India has never found much thought for the chronically poor; it has always worshipped those like Gandhi who give up what they have, not those who had nothing to give away. It wasn’t heroic to be poor; it was heroic to choose to turn away from riches.

Wealth, over the Gandhi years, had come to be associated with extractive colonization that flowed into a perception of exploitative capitalism. Money was seen as necessarily ill-gotten, and so only the poor necessarily could win respect; only they could have qualities you could look up to. And what would be a hero whose values were other than those that commanded respect? Profit arose only from criminality. Others came into wealth through inheritance; they must then prove goodness by parting with at least some of it. Fractional philanthropy became the cinematically popular face of socialism. Goodness lay in giving from the heart; the little we see of structured socialism is still driven more by heart than any ideological invocation. It’s instinctive, as it was for Gandhi.

A touch of structured socialism appears towards the end of Shree 420. A happy ending brings home ownership to the poor, but this still stops short of any communist-like abandonment of private ownership. The dream of the poor that comes true is the dream to own. Indian states such as West Bengal and Kerala had communist governments, but none went so far as the classic communist ideal of abandoning the institution of ownership. Gandhi himself spoke about the humanity of sharing, but he was no communist. In line with this, the hero gives, and gives up – but does not give up the very idea of having. Dev Anand never did play Comrade Dev Anand.

The cinema presents less the villainy of capitalism as an ideological position than the villainy of a capitalism that did not give some capital to the poor. It’s this villainous capitalist who twists the plot, who takes from the poor instead of giving to them. No one turns up on screen who is good and also remains comfortably well-off other than a few passing dads whose appearances are as forgettable as they are fleeting.

The dads can have two forgettable faces, though. The bad face of money for its own sake against which the hero rebels to give to the poor, and the good dad who has the hero on his side. A closer study of dads is unlikely to prove exciting but, through emulation or challenge, the hero ends up properly against money if not against the particular dad. Gandhi hovers as the father above the father. The father of the nation that India collectively declared Gandhi to be appears as the father figure of this entire cinema. It is he who leads producers and directors to give the plot a moral direction.

The position with the mother is usually rather different. The mother has had a longer life in Bollywood perhaps than in all of the rest of cinema put together. Between father and mother, they do something every time to get the Gandhi