Matinee Ideal

This rose-tinted view of the Hindi film industry is replete with superstar shimmer and triumphant fairy tale moments

BOLLYWOOD: A HISTORY By Mihir Bose Lotus/Roli Price: Rs 495 Pages: 380

PICTURE SPEAK

GLORY DAYS: The book tells the same old stories with added glitter

History is the repetition of stories as truth. The victors tell the story of the war from their side. Successful people are listened to, they get published, the little people don’t believe that their tales are worth listening to, and so are lost. Bollywood: A History is a comprehensive and impressive collection of the stories of the shiny people: the stars, the successful producers. They are taken from all the books that have been written so far on the many-headed hydra known as Bollywood. The good thing about the stories is that they are rocking, ripping, rollicking, good yarns—all full of love, fame, disaster, madness and, like all good Indian tales, contain large dollops of the supernatural. It is almost impossible not to get sucked into the romance and the drama of Nargis selling her gold bangles to fund her lover’s film; the ghostly inspiration for Mahal; fearless Nadia’s spirited entry into films; the big Malini-Jeetendra love triangle; the endlessly readable stories surrounding the filming of Sholay....

People may criticise Bose for not finding new stories, for not providing them with anything that they couldn’t find some place else. But as a society we have only ourselves to blame; we do not have the systems in place to record or listen to the other types of stories. We like to have a history that is cohesive and enables us to make sense of the past in a way that reaffirms our present day belief systems.

At one point Bose does flag up the almost ritualistic format of some of the stories surrounding the Indian film stars of yesteryear. Here we have Ashok Kumar talking to Dev Anand: “Why are you seated here? What do you want?” “Sir, my name is Dev Anand. I am an actor and I want a job.” “Have you acted before? Are you acting in any films right now?” “I have acted in one film, which did not do well. I have no work now.” “Come with me.”

This is almost exactly the same as how Ashok Kumar remembers his interview with Himansu Rai and how Devika Rani remembers her meeting with Dilip Kumar. And, interestingly, how Amitabh Bachchan chose to present his meeting with Yash Chopra in the late 1990s when his career, although megastar and all, was at a particularly low ebb: “I walked to his house and said, I am an actor and I want a job. My films have not done well. I have no work now.”

The result of all these conversations has been success. Which, even if the path is littered with depression, ruin, heartbreak, madness and death, is what we like to celebrate. Bollywood shimmers in our imagination because we need it to. And Bollywood: A History allows us to keep it this way.

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