Sholay, 1975 | THE BIRTH OF THE FANDEMICIndia had seen hits before. But Sholay seared into its collective psyche like a badland bullet. The effect was on a scale never seen before—one film creating a new mass folk culture. And a trail of monster blockbusters that still continues AWESOME FOURSOME Jai, Veeru, Thakur and Gabbar in their off-screen avatarChholey.” Believe it or not, that’s what they called it. Notes of scepticism and vinegary derision marked the Hindi cinema universe’s first responses to this self-consciously grandiose, Rs 3-crore curry western which, at three hours and 20 minutes, must have seemed like a little too much chholey! Trade papers prophesied doom amidst a tepid first fortnight after Sholay’s release on August 15, 1975. The commentariat—including, er, india today—reacted negatively to the cultish violence reminiscent of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. But soon, something started welling up from the street. At a tactile level, it may have been disorienting at first for audiences—what with India’s first stereophonic sound. At some point, though, the compelling drama at the heart of that sheer visual-aural expanse started filtering through. This wasn’t just robotic technical wizardry. Mounted atop the saddles of this dizzily revolving fairground merry-go-round was a real human panorama. The characters were endearing and attractive while being gritty as granite. The landscape charred by gunsmoke also exploded with laughter. And there was Gabbar Singh, a descent into the unknown. Nobody had seen evil quite like it. Sholay began speaking to the audiences. And soon enough, the audiences began speaking Sholay! Literally, parroting the Salim-Javed lines. The rest of the story is well-known. Kitne aadmi thhe? How many were there, asked the baddie. Well, hundreds of millions, over the years, at cinema halls in India and abroad. Even as far back as 1985, india today had estimated a gross audience of 250 million. Takehome? Fully Rs 35 crore! This was hardly the first time Bollywood had seen a film that kept growing bigger, from conception, to execution, to collections. Even if you leave aside earlier prototypes of the blockbuster phenomenon that presaged Sholay’s famous five-year run at Bombay’s Minerva theatre, canonical hits like Mother India (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960) had entrenched the idea of big-budget, ensemble-cast marquee madness. But Sholay was a Big Bang that created a quantum universe all its own—as intimate as it was epic, as unique in its internal combustion as it was a collage of borrowed memes, and impossible to recreate as a magic trick even as its tropes got repeated. Again, and again, forever. Galloping in on the heels of Deewaar, his other defining 1975 film, Sholay also confirmed we had a superstar like none before in Amitabh Bachchan. His era as absolute sovereign lasted a decade. Even so, he remained the most enduring guarantor of success in countless two-hero and ensemble outings. The big-budget multi-starrer format was itself attempted numerous times, sometimes meeting with success, sometimes not. Think Amitabh’s own Amar Akbar Anthony, Shaan and Naseeb, or contemporaneous fare like The Burning Train, not to speak of a string of imitation Sholays, all the way from Loha and Joshilaay in the ’80s to China Gate around the turn of the millennium, each with their own desperate tweak on a Gabbar Singh-like desperado. But along the way, as the Eighties wore on and audiences warmed to cosy drawing-room dramas on TV, action-’n-revenge out in the badlands started losing its horsepower. It’s not a coincidence that the film that would finally outdo Sholay was the unabashedly feelgood Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! in 1994. Call it the revenge of romance. Fronted by a woman (Madhuri Dixit), its first half ran like a shaadi video. It didn’t have horses, but a Pomeranian was a pivotal character. So suffused in fun was the musical that there was no room for a baddie, let alone a fight sequence, in its 3-hour, 26-minute run time. And yes, it also featured Salman, one of the holy trinity of Khans whose reign would mark another era in Bollywood. Individually, the trio would keep raising the bar for blockbusters: Rs 200 crore (3 Idiots, Sultan, Ek Tha Tiger), Rs 300 crore (Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Dangal) and Rs 500 crore (Pathaan, Jawan). But Sholay could out a Salman line...“where I stand, the line starts from there.” THE TELESERIALS | WHEN SMALL TURNS BIGIn the Eighties, Indian television went from a dull grey box to the full colours of immersive storytelling.The multichannel revolution was waiting to explode on the other side In the India of 1975, the small screen was…pretty small. It had only been a decade since daily telecasts began, four hours of sputtering B&W visuals—in two capsules, morning and evening. ‘Sorry for the Interruption’ may have been the longest-running programme. There was only Doordarshan, and Doordarshan didn’t go very far. Only seven cities, its stations still a stepney to AIR. The maximum possible audience was five million. That graph wasn’t exactly stagnant—thanks to Chitrahaar, cricket and class mobility—but the real liftoff was awaited. That came with Asiad ’82, when there was a flood of light—and colour. Literally. India’s first major international sporting competition was preceded by the launch of INSAT-1a (an early demise hastened 1b) and the introduction of colour television. But the technological fits and restarts were only one part, the juice was in the content.It’s with Hum Log, beginning 1984, that Indians discovered TV could be seriously habit-forming. Though aligned to the goody-goody aims of public broadcasting, the story of Basesar Ram & Family offered unending immersion, unlike with a film. Viewers were hooked. Advertisers lined up—Maggi 2-Minute Noodles debuted on its aisles. Soap-operatic intoxication continued with newer potions. From 2.1 million TV sets with an estimated 15 million viewership in 1982, India zoomed to over 15 million sets and a viewership of 75 million by the end of the Eighties. Now that entertainment had been domesticated, a segment of households plugged in a VCR. For a while, it looked like video might kill the film star. Cinema has never ceased fighting that competition. The boundaries were fraught, but also porous. To spruce up its programming slate, DD reached out to filmmakers. Many obliged. Mahesh Bhatt made Janam for TV. Shyam Benegal did Bharat Ek Khoj. And the biggest blockbusters came from crossover folks: Ramesh Sippy’s Buniyaad (1986), Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan (1987), B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat (1989). COLOUR DAWN The earlier avatar of the colour TV setThe wheel spun in wider and wider circles thereafter: DD’s long monopoly being broken by liberalisation and satellite television, the rise to stardom of the remote button as channels proliferated, local as well as global, and then what you might call the next set of migrants from the world of cinema. Shobha and Ekta Kapoor, wife and daughter of Jeetendra, a prototypical film actor from another era, changed the dynamics of television programming with their ‘K’ dramas. And by the time Amitabh Bachchan debuted on TV with Kaun Banega Crorepati in 2000, no one was in any doubt that small was phenomenally big. nTHE INDIPOP TREND | DISCO GOES DESIFor ages, the film song ruled. Nothing else was audible.Then came Nazia, charioteered by Biddu, and Indian ears went into a pleasant madness. Literally, Disco Deewane. A whole genre was born BHANGRA PIONEER Malkit SinghYou could say film music conceived its own alter ego, carried it in its womb, and it went on to have a life of its own—with a racing pulse, and a disco heartbeat. It was through the good offices of Zeenat Aman and Feroz Khan, in that order, that one London-based expat came together with another in perfect, peppy euphony—for the movie Qurbani. Nazia Hassan, with all the saltiness of Karachi’s air in her beaten-silver voice, was only 15. Biddu, the long-haired, leather-clad Coorgi, had already known global fame as a disco pioneer. ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’, their first outing, sizzled on the tawa like Bollywood music never quite had before: the words dusted with homemade spices, the vibe pure phoren-returned, Nazia’s smoked vocal confetti gliding leisurely through sonic bubbles bursting out of Biddu’s lush, synth-based orchestration. India was bewitched. Enough for the duo to want to do the voodoo again—this time outside of a film. Result: a superbug of an album in Disco Deewane (1981). The same blend: long, salty glissandos laid on a red-hot, four-by-four disco grill. It came like arson on a whole subcontinent. Platinum, double platinum, copies getting pilfered from railway shipment depots. Amid such pleasant madness was Indian pop officially born.India’s music industry had for deca­des been a protectorate of its song-laden cinema. Only a few non-film niches sur­vived on the edges: classical, devotional et al. “Disco Deewane came like a breath of fresh air in that market,” says Atul Churamani, co-founder of record label Magnasound. “It saw a peak in interest from local labels like HMV and Music India in non-film music.” The cascading effect went in all directions. The title track—tossed in at the last minute, by music industry lore—explicitly referenced ‘disco’. This gave a name to the fever that would grip the nation in the Eighties, filtering back to films, with Bappi Lahiri creating the memorable OST to Disco Dancer with classics like ‘Jimmy Jimmy’, even old-timers Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar jiving to ‘Disco 82’, and a long comet’s tail with blinking lights thereon. The word would enter the Indian lexicon, marking out a revelrous party zone for ever-wider circles but also proverbially signifying anything hip, happy and modern. Soon, even subziwallahs were classifying their papayas into two types: desi and disco! The genre Nazia-Biddu inaugurat­ed—and amped up with Boom Boom—had enough élan vital to demand and acquire its own independent, sovereign territory. Filmi gaana wasn’t about to be muted, of course, even if it mutated. The ‘old is gold’ anthology still ruled the AIR waves. Doordarshan wouldn’t let Indian pop much into the room either, but it midwifed the revolution by giving wide play to the Grammies and the like: Michael Jackson & Co. ended up inflecting mass Indian tastes way more than ’70s disco. And Indian epigones found a home on DD Metro’s Pop Time—a shortlived half-hour show that showcased ‘Western music with an Indian accent’. A glut of new artists filled the new niche: Sharon Prabhakar, the bustling rock ’n roll refugee Remo Fernandes, and going on to Alisha Chinai, Preeti Sagar, Suneeta Rao. By the ’90s, this motley crew had been collectively christened Indipop.And was it popping! Apache Indian and Baba Sehgal brought in rap— Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby became ‘Thanda Thanda Paani’. Chinai and Biddu topped the charts with Made in India. Lucky Ali got everyone crooning to ‘O Sanam’. Accelerating their popularity was satellite television—India now had MTV and Channel V. They shared space with a global smorgasbord. The number of Indipop videos made shot up from 36 in 1996 to over 600 in 1999; the genre covered some 6 per cent of the market. Its internal span, too, was widened and enriched as classically trained singers like Shankar Mahadevan, Shubha Mudgal and Hariharan (teaming with Leslie Lewis for Colonial Cousins) joined the scene. The linguistic canvas expanded beyond Hinglish: Punjabi folk-pop broke down the doors, first with Malkit Singh, and then with a bundle of energy called Daler Mehndi. If a poverty of ideas lingered, remixed Hindi film classics filled the gap.But filmdom soon began predating upon the genre to bring the party home. Even as film folks like Asha Bhosle, Anu Malik and even Amitabh Bachchan dabbled on that side—as did A.R. Rahman, one born on the cusp of sensibilities—cinema lured pop stars like Shaan, Lucky Ali, Mohit Chauhan of Silk Route, Adnan Sami, Chinai and Shweta Shetty for playback singing and Indipop composers like Ram Sampath, Ranjit Barot and Salim-Sulaiman to pep up soundtracks. By the mid-2000s, says Churamani, there was little novelty left and music channels struggled for ad revenues, turning to reality shows instead. But the music genie itself was out of the bottle. The non-film ecosystem, ever diversifying, pops and fizzes in the age of YouTube and Spotify. - EndsPublished By: Arunima JhaPublished On: Dec 21, 2024 21:20 IST
