Last September, American awards pundits cocked their eyebrows in confusion when the Indian Film Federation announced which movie it decided to submit as India’s official entry to the Oscars for its international film category. The body declined to select director S.S. Rajamouli’s maximalist Telugu-language blockbuster RRR, opting instead for director Pan Nalin’s more modestly scaled Gujarati ode to cinephilia, Last Film Show. The derision at this seeming miscalculation wasn’t terribly surprising. RRR was that rare Indian film that captivated audiences beyond India, enjoying healthy runs in American theaters and a robust afterlife on Netflix (albeit dubbed in Hindi). Even after Last Film Show made the Academy’s pre-nomination shortlist of 15 films, commentators still groaned that, by forgoing RRR, India fumbled what seemed to be a sure shot at Oscar glory.
For a time, RRR became an object of affection among critics in America who were besotted with its dazzling visual kineticism and anti-colonialist gloss. Set in 1920s India, the film imagines what would have transpired had two revolutionaries of Indian history, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju, joined forces to challenge British rule. More than three hours long, the film is paced with such diligence that the narrative moves at a clip, though it offers intermittent reprieves in the form of earworms like “Naatu Naatu” (now competing for best original song at the Oscars). As a piece of entertainment, RRR is certainly the work of an accomplished craftsman. That a film from South India managed to break the hegemony of popular Hindi cinema, or Bollywood, may also make RRR’s boffo success seem like the triumph of an underdog. But RRR also joyfully trades on a grammar of excess, and this may partially explain why it struck such a chord with viewers around the world. The film did not challenge so much as confirm a certain view of Indian cinema that exists in the global mind: that Indian films are jammed with song and dance by design, that they are aware and proud of their own earnest ridiculousness (computer-generated tigers, snakes, and leopards abound in RRR), and that they know how to give audiences a good time.
But as RRR’s reputation grew, so too did its status as a cause célèbre among Indian-origin viewers, who argued that any enchantment with the film’s infectious spectacle beclouded its latent politics. This dissent included criticisms that the film undignified Adivasi (Indigenous tribal groups) while reifying upper-caste dominance and laundered India’s image as a Hindu rather than secular state. A jubilant end credits song meant to rouse patriotic fervor, in which the film’s stars pose before images of India’s freedom fighters, similarly received blowback for valorizing outwardly militant figures while eliding such nonviolent resistance leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit icon and chief architect of the country’s constitution. (In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Rajamouli was circumspect about such issues: “I hate extremism, whether it is the BJP, Muslim League, or whatever,” he said, referring to the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party that is currently in power, also stating that his primary objective was to entertain audiences—no matter what station of Indian life they belong to.)
Last September, American awards pundits cocked their eyebrows in confusion when the Indian Film Federation announced which movie it decided to submit as India’s official entry to the Oscars for its international film category. The body declined to select director S.S. Rajamouli’s maximalist Telugu-language blockbuster RRR, opting instead for director Pan Nalin’s more modestly scaled Gujarati ode to cinephilia, Last Film Show. The derision at this seeming miscalculation wasn’t terribly surprising. RRR was that rare Indian film that captivated audiences beyond India, enjoying healthy runs in American theaters and a robust afterlife on Netflix (albeit dubbed in Hindi). Even after Last Film Show made the Academy’s pre-nomination shortlist of 15 films, commentators still groaned that, by forgoing RRR, India fumbled what seemed to be a sure shot at Oscar glory.
For a time, RRR became an object of affection among critics in America who were besotted with its dazzling visual kineticism and anti-colonialist gloss. Set in 1920s India, the film imagines what would have transpired had two revolutionaries of Indian history, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju, joined forces to challenge British rule. More than three hours long, the film is paced with such diligence that the narrative moves at a clip, though it offers intermittent reprieves in the form of earworms like “Naatu Naatu” (now competing for best original song at the Oscars). As a piece of entertainment, RRR is certainly the work of an accomplished craftsman. That a film from South India managed to break the hegemony of popular Hindi cinema, or Bollywood, may also make RRR’s boffo success seem like the triumph of an underdog. But RRR also joyfully trades on a grammar of excess, and this may partially explain why it struck such a chord with viewers around the world. The film did not challenge so much as confirm a certain view of Indian cinema that exists in the global mind: that Indian films are jammed with song and dance by design, that they are aware and proud of their own earnest ridiculousness (computer-generated tigers, snakes, and leopards abound in RRR), and that they know how to give audiences a good time.
But as RRR’s reputation grew, so too did its status as a cause célèbre among Indian-origin viewers, who argued that any enchantment with the film’s infectious spectacle beclouded its latent politics. This dissent included criticisms that the film undignified Adivasi (Indigenous tribal groups) while reifying upper-caste dominance and laundered India’s image as a Hindu rather than secular state. A jubilant end credits song meant to rouse patriotic fervor, in which the film’s stars pose before images of India’s freedom fighters, similarly received blowback for valorizing outwardly militant figures while eliding such nonviolent resistance leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit icon and chief architect of the country’s constitution. (In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Rajamouli was circumspect about such issues: “I hate extremism, whether it is the BJP, Muslim League, or whatever,” he said, referring to the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party that is currently in power, also stating that his primary objective was to entertain audiences—no matter what station of Indian life they belong to.)
RRR’s politics may be a Rorschach test for viewers, but its appeal to audiences outside of India leads us to another compelling conversation about what Indian films capture the global imagination. A casual gander at global box office figures for films like RRR might suggest that these are boom times for the masala film, a term for that co-mingling of seemingly discordant genres—melodrama, slapstick, action, and musicals—into a uniquely Indian cinematic product. After a dispiriting period at the box office for projects of this nature (especially during the peak of the pandemic’s cruelty in India), the past year alone provided a few occasions for optimism. Among 2022’s crowd-pleasers was director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi, a drama about a brothel madam who fights for the empowerment of fellow sex workers; it had impressive returns at the box office outside of India and an even livelier run on Netflix, where, reports claimed, it immediately became the platform’s No. 1 non-English film while also remaining within the top 10 most-watched titles across 25 countries for several weeks. The attention led its team to mount campaigns for the Academy Awards and the BAFTAs, signaling a confidence in popular Indian cinema’s ability to compete for prestige hardware on a global stage.
Turn also to the recently released Pathaan, another big-budget title that broke $100 million at the global box office in under two weeks despite organized efforts to derail its success. The film is a high-octane action yarn in which the titular character (beloved superstar Shah Rukh Khan) fights to protect India from a bioweapon controlled by an Indian national who is conspiring with a Pakistani army general. Pathaan is more than two-and-a-half hours long, yet it is a brisk watch that demands viewers shut off their minds and succumb to its contrivances. There is a motorcycle chase sequence on a frozen lake in Siberia, a brawl atop a train, and a midair pursuit on jetpacks. It is, in other words, calibrated to delight moviegoers. Prior to its release, however, Pathaan fell victim to a smear campaign from hard-liners for a slew of alleged offenses, namely female star Deepika Padukone’s saffron-colored swimsuit during a song sequence; some on the right wing perceived this costuming as an affront to Hinduism given its skimpiness and invocation of a sacred hue. (The film also had a target on its back by virtue of its leading man, Khan, being Muslim.)
It would be foolish to paint the politics of these films with too broad a brush. Although Gangubai Kathiawadi might hew to a populist rubric with its extravagant visual ostentation, one of its most pivotal sequences features a stirring monologue from the titular character arguing for the rights of sex workers. (Bhansali has also been a target of the Hindu right before, most notably when making the 2018 epic Padmaavat.) Pathaan, at its core, is a patriotic film predicated on an heroic defense of the Indian state—although it toes a delicate line in service of entertaining the masses; in an essay published this February, writer Azad Essa took the film to task for deracinating its central character, who declares fealty to his country without aligning himself with any particular religious identity.
But the staggering global success of these films may also engender some other laments, perhaps suggesting that global audiences are still infatuated with an incomplete view of Indian entertainment as a technicolor circus of song and dance—all while heroes and villains are rendered monochromatically. A more textured view of the Indian artistic landscape, however, emerges with consideration of streaming platforms like Amazon India, Netflix, and Disney+ Hotstar (which became available on Hulu in the United States in 2021). These internet-based services have gained greater groundswell both within and outside of India in recent years, particularly as the pandemic kept more viewers housebound. With marginally more leeway for progressive storytelling, these platforms reveal a portrait of India that is more pluralistic and intersectional than onlookers may initially believe.
Four years ago, both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video seemed to be at serious loggerheads in their competition for the hearts of Indian viewers. The former’s most prominent titles included two dramas, the propulsive thriller Sacred Games (2018-2019) and the brooding Delhi Crime (2019-present). The former garnered an International Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama Series in 2019; the latter netted India its first win in that same category in 2020. Amazon Prime Video’s Made in Heaven (2019-present), meanwhile, charted the lives of two wedding planners and gracefully skewered the rich and pampered of India’s elite. These shows put a forensic spotlight on social issues that more traditional forms of entertainment may have been hesitant to broach: Delhi Crime’s first season retraces the harrowing 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh. Sacred Games’ use of a sacred Vedic chant made a politician afflict Netflix with claims of “defaming Hindus.” One of Made in Heaven’s principal characters is a gay man who suffers at the hands of the state for the crime of his sexuality.
The streaming terrain has only been widening in variety, and growing bolder, ever since. Consider Amazon Prime Video’s Four More Shots Please! (2019-present), an uneven but brash series primarily in English that the New York Times labeled as India’s answer to Sex and the City. This analogy, while imperfect, captures the show’s brazen spirit: Centered on four female friends in Mumbai, the show makes no bones about its courage—tackling, with self-conscious gusto, such topics as queerness (the fulcrum of the second season finale concerns a wedding between two women) and sex work (one character is a cam girl in her spare time, only for a much older family friend to dangle the threat of exposure over her). Some may see the show’s engagement with these themes as more superficial than sensitive, treating characters as their identities rather than probing the full scope of their humanity. But the vigor of the show’s vision is distinctive, and it would be unwise to write off its resonance: Four More Shots Please! received a nomination at the 2020 International Emmy Awards in the comedy category—a first in that category for an Indian show—while, that same year, its second season was reportedly the most-watched Indian show on Amazon Prime Video. This, too, is India, some may extrapolate from watching the series: a country where young women want to express themselves freely and fearlessly, without any care for impropriety.
A similar sense of playfulness pervades Netflix’s Masaba Masaba (2020-present), a charming series that fictionalizes the travails of two very real Indian celebrities, fashion designer Masaba Gupta and her mother, actress Neena Gupta. (Both women play analogs of themselves on the show.) The elder Gupta had given birth to her daughter out of wedlock, the product of an affair with Antiguan cricketer Viv Richards (who is Black). That Masaba Masaba puts the emotional world of a mixed-race woman at its fore feels like a refreshing disruption of Indian entertainment’s homogeneity, in which heroes and heroines often tend to look the same. Yet this breezy, pleasant show does not tokenize its characters based on the superficial aspects of their identity. Both women struggle, and their specificity makes them relatable: Masaba bounces back into the dating game after a divorce while navigating a tense relationship with her mother and a fractured one with her father; Neena, for her part, attempts to stage a career comeback after a long stretch away from acting. One can only hope that Masaba Masaba’s very existence on a platform like Netflix, where it has run for two seasons, causes more showrunners to probe whose stories they center and why.
Filmmakers, too, have taken advantage of such creative latitude streamers in recent years, examining difficult subject matter with dauntlessness. Director Jasmeet Reen’s Darlings (2022), reportedly Netflix’s highest-ever opening for a non-English Indian film, is a big formal swing. The film follows the efforts of a woman nicknamed Badrunnisa (played by actress Alia Bhatt of the aforementioned Gangubai Kathiawadi) to escape a physically and emotionally abusive marriage with the help of her mother (played by actress Shefali Shah). Some viewers may expect a straight drama based on such a description, yet it is more accurate to characterize Darlings as a dark comedy. The film swerves between zany farce and grave tragedy in the space of mere minutes; Reen can elicit a belly laugh from the viewer as a prelude to a wince, reminding them of the grim reality of Badrunnisa’s predicament. Although one’s mileage may vary with these tonal turnabouts, Reen’s unorthodox approach feels like a departure from other recent treatments of domestic violence—such as, say, the pre-pandemic theatrical release of Thappad (2020), a somber drama about a woman’s decision to end her marriage following her husband’s abusive behavior.
Darlings, with its rapid shifts in mood, feels like the kind of cinematic risk that may play best on streaming. On streaming, after all, audiences may be more diffuse; they could be sitting anywhere in the world as long as they’ve got an account on a streamer of their choosing. What’s more is that they might come to a streaming film with a more open mind than they’d bring to a theater. “There is a way of telling those simple stories or real stories, which is common on OTT,” the film’s star, Bhatt, said in an interview last August, referring to “over-the-top” (OTT) streaming services. “Whereas when you are going to the theater, you want to watch something that is larger than life, which is an entertainer.” Filmmakers for theatrical releases may face pressure to chase lofty box office figures too, appealing to the lowest common denominator while tiptoeing around inflexible audience sentiments. It follows, then, that directors working on streaming may not be hamstrung by such rigid mandates, thus affording them the chance to take more gambles.
That’s not to suggest, however, that such ambition is solely confined to Hindi- and English-language output. One Amazon Prime Video title that unexpectedly generated international awareness was director T.J. Gnanavel’s Tamil courtroom drama Jai Bhim (2021), which chronicles a lawyer’s quest for justice for members of a disadvantaged Irula tribal community who have suffered from police brutality. Response to the film was enthusiastic in India (though it did attract a fair amount of critiques for peddling a savior narrative through its focus on the dominant caste lawyer as well as for its unrelenting scenes of violence against Adivasi that some labeled “torture porn”). It was another noteworthy contribution to the robust tradition of anti-caste filmmaking that exists within present-day Tamil cinema. Films with such political preoccupations, however, rarely receive much play beyond India and its diaspora, which is why it was somewhat surprising when there were murmurs last year that this particular one gained an audience among Academy Awards voters. Recognition from such an awards body may have been a pipe dream for the film. But the fact that a South Indian film—one whose dominant thematic concern is caste discrimination at that—managed to permeate such a conversation at all feels encouraging. Perhaps the global preconception of India’s cinema as little more than frothy popcorn outings may one day change, and a more diverse slate of films from the country might just break through to larger audiences.
Despite the dynamic variety of offerings on OTT platforms, Indian streaming is by no means a rosy creative utopia, and its future seems uncertain. Cynics might even call that future downright bleak. The stark reality is that these showrunners and filmmakers have increasingly become subject to the same censorious governmental whims that so often muzzle artists across the country. This chilling effect has also led both creators and executives to self-censor as a preemptive gesture. In a wide-ranging piece for the New Yorker last October, journalist Samanth Subramanian recounted how artists creating original shows and films for such platforms as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have seen their more thematically daring works altered by streamers to genuflect to conservative backlash—or they were stuck in release limbo. In the words of one ex-Amazon Prime executive Subramaniam interviewed, some writers and directors may have “assumed streaming platforms would give them the freedom and funds to tell whatever stories they wanted, without any checks and balances,” only for them to realize that they were not immune to the routine edicts that other artists in the mainstream face.
One particular flash point came with Amazon Prime Video’s Tandav (2021), a streaming series that the platform re-edited after politicians levied charges against the show for supposed mockery of Hindu deities. Since that fracas, Subramaniam’s reporting demonstrated, streaming services have grown even more cautious of inciting anger from the government and its sympathizers. Another such example is that of director Dibakar Banerjee’s Hindi film Tees (initially titled Freedom), a planned Netflix original that maps the lives of three generations of one Muslim family in India across the past, present, and future of the country—a topical concept that could easily offend those in power. After Banerjee completed postproduction in 2021, Netflix reportedly gave him the runaround about a release date. (In February of this year, months after the publication of Subramaniam’s article, Netflix officially shelved Banerjee’s film, and it awaits acquisition as of writing.) With such episodes in mind, artists creating films and shows for these streaming services may indeed grow more apprehensive in the years that follow, sanding the edges off their creative output to dodge the very real possibility of threats and violence.
These incidents augur a bleak few years to come for Indian streaming. But there could be good reason to retain some hope. Perhaps the boundary-pushing streaming efforts of the past few years will continue to find greater appreciation both within and outside of India, especially as viewers continue to diversify their media diets beyond the easy delights of titles like RRR and Pathaan. Such support from audiences may very well help keep that vibrant, creative ecosystem alive, allowing artists to reenvision what Indians want from their entertainment while the world watches from the comfort of their living rooms or smartphones.
The post India’s Global Blockbusters Paint an Incomplete Picture appeared first on Foreign Policy.
