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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Volume 10 Number 2, August 2009

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Hogan, Patrick Colm, Understanding Indian Movies. Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2008, 293 pp., ISBN 978-0-292-71786-2, $ 55, cloth.

Reviewed by

Reinhold Schein

Germany 

Indian movies have become trendy outside India; some even have acquired cult status. Nobody is lukewarm about them. You either love them or hate them. However the majority of cinema viewers in the West – and many even in India – rate them as trashy productions with extremely implausible plots. Moreover, the action is frequently interrupted with music and dance, and you just can’t tell why. Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, proves coherently that there is more to Indian cinema than shallow entertainment. His aim is to help viewers ‘comprehend and (critically) appreciate those films.’

To this end Hogan has chosen 11 films for detailed description and analysis, mainly classical Hindi movies, produced from the 1950s up to 2001. But first of all he introduces the key concepts of universality and cultural particularity. Just as fictional literature all over the world Indian cinema, too, can be reduced to a very small set of narrative prototypes, such as the romantic or the heroic plot, each with a tragic or a happy end, or in a tragicomical version. Due to this universality readers or viewers can comprehend and emotionally relate to stories set in environments far away from their own cultural background. But as each story is also embedded in its own cultural context one has to know something about this context in order to arrive at a fuller comprehension and greater aesthetic enjoyment.

Throughout the book Hogan gives many examples of the still immensely productive power of Hindu mythology whose central persons, the divine couples Shiva and Parvati, Vishnu and Lakshmi and their human incarnations Radha-Krishna and Sita-Rama, are well known to all Indians – not only Hindus – right from their childhood. Indian movies are full of references and allusions to mythological episodes and symbolic images. Puranic legends about Radha and Krishna offer unlimited material for romantic love stories whereas the Ramayana epic with its hero Rama and his great adversary Ravana is an equally inexhaustible source of heroic scenarios. Furthermore, Indian cinema is influenced by ancient Indian philosophies, Islamic thought and poetry, particularly from the Sufi-tradition, by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, by western progressive and socialist ideas, and other sources.

Another constitutive element of Indian cinema is its rootedness in the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition with its peculiar description of emotions and corresponding empathic reactions.

In the first chapter, entitled ‘From Mythical Romance to Historical Sacrifice’, Hogan gives a detailed description of the film Ardhangini (‘The Spouse’, 1959) as a prototypical example of the romantic tragicomedy. With multiple mythological references the film deals with untouchability, a highly controversial topic in Indian society up to this day. The films Baaz (‘The Hawk’, 1953) and The Terrorist (1999) display heroic plots. Baaz is set in the 16^th century, the early period of Portuguese rule over Goa, but it really lashes out at the British colonial rule in India which ended just a few years before the production of the film. Hero and heroine engage themselves in anti-colonial struggle. As there is a happy end Hogan characterizes it as a heroic tragicomedy. The Terrorist, however, is the entirely tragic story of the assassination of India’s former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female suicide bomber, a member of the Tamil Tigers, in 1991.

The second chapter discusses two films about the justification of violence as a means for social change. In Nishant (‘The End of the Night’, 1975) the eruption of violence as a result of social injustice becomes comprehensible, but it is rejected quite in line with Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings. In a comparable situation of social injustice Sholay (‘Flames’, also 1975) openly legitimates the use of violence. Hogan sees this film as a willful rejection of the Gandhian legacy. It is remarkable that both movies support their antithetic argumentation with references to the Ramayana.

In the third chapter, entitled ‘Once More, with Feeling’, Hogan deals with the Indian tradition of depicting emotions and arousing empathy. He summarizes the aesthetic theory established by Bharata Muni about 2000 years ago, who described a set of nine main emotions (bhava) which in turn produce corresponding feelings of empathy (rasa). While the actors on the stage (or now on the cinema screen) express emotions, the viewers experience empathy. In Mother India (1957) motherly love and compassion are the dominant feelings, in Shree 420 (1955) it is mirth, and in Bandit Queen (1994) it is anger. All the three films in this chapter deal with aspects of social reality in India and they can be seen as allegories for the possible further development of the Nation. In Shree 420 - the title refers to the fraud paragraph in the Indian penal code, so it means ‘Mr. Cheat’ - the very names of the main persons point beyond themselves. The male hero, Raj (which means command or governance), has to make a choice between two attractive women, named Vidya (true knowledge) and Maya (illusion). The opposition of true spiritual knowledge versus the illusory lure of the world is based on Vedanta philosophy. But the film also transports western socialist ideas, e.g. in the negative portrayal of the capitalist Dharmanand and the idealized depiction of the simple folks. Hogan, however, exaggerates when he describes Shree 420 as fully in line with the program of the Communist Party of India.

The fourth chapter deals with the most typical feature of Indian movies: their frequent musical interludes. Using the example of the Bollywood blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gam (‘Sometimes Happy Sometimes Sad’, 2001) Hogan shows that songs and dances are not inserted arbitrarily. They invariably appear at certain narrative junctures. They may for example summarize a long stretch of time between two portions of the action. Musical or lyrical interludes have a prominent place already in the aesthetics of the Sanskrit drama. They enhance the emotional impact of the action. They can also hint at the actual or desired sexual union of the lovers which is never explicitly shown in Indian films.

The fifth chapter deals with visual elements such as colours, light and shadow, with camera work and techniques of editing. In Umrao Jaan (1981) a sophisticated technique of cutting creates an impression of discontinuity and unreality of the ongoing action. This in turn is consistent with the strong undercurrent of Sufi philosophy in this story about the highly cultured courtesan Umrao who lives in a luxurious house of pleasure in 19^th century Lucknow. Quite in tune with the Persian and Indian tradition of Sufi poetry the imagery of the lyrical interludes can be understood as straightforwardly amorous or as a spiritual longing for union with the divine beloved. In Fire (1996) orange, white and green are dominant - the colours of the Indian national tricolour. In fact this film about the socially precarious love between two women has a national political message, too. It repudiates the traditionally domineering role of men in Indian society and subtly points towards Sufism (in which the purest and loftiest elements of Islamic as well as Hindu thought have merged) as a potential power to overcome the communalist fragmentation of Indian society.

The book ends with an afterword, followed by annotations, a comprehensive bibliography and a keyword index.

Has Hogan achieved his object ‘to provide the viewer with knowledge and skills that will help him or her to view, and to enjoy, a wide range of Indian movies’? My assessment is mixed. The basic concept to point out typical elements of Indian cinema on the basis of a rather small selection of films is fine. Hogan’s summaries of the film plots make an enthralling reading. Really helpful for a deeper understanding are his explanations about Hindu mythology, Sanskrit aesthetics, Sufism and other philosophical or cultural influences. The book is also very well illustrated with black-and-white screenshots.

Less convincing and sometimes irritating are the lengthy summaries of the results of research in psychology and cognitive neurosciences, interlarded with frequent quotations. These sections often seem trivial; they hardly explain anything which one wouldn’t know anyway. Sometimes Hogan quotes chains of highly abstract conclusions, bundled up in a few lines, which are at the best marginally related to the topic of the book and certainly don’t contribute to deepened understanding and enhanced enjoyment of Indian movies. These passages amount to about one fourth of the book. They may have been necessary to upgrade the book scientifically and publish it in the University of Texas Press. But this luggage, along with the rather prohibitive price of 55$, will prevent most non-academic readers from even noticing Hogan’s book, which is a pity because it definitely offers a lot of valuable information.