Angry Young Man Bollywood

[Queila Neubecker]

Inpost-colonial India of the 1970s, Mumbai, in overcrowded and antiquated local trains each day thousands of middle-class commuters, dabbawalas, women, and schoolchildren traveled to their disparate destinations. Some played cards, others prayed to their God/ Goddesses or even to Jesus and Allah, while kids like me looked at the torn and reposted posters of Bollywood movies like Deewar, Sholay, Muqqadar ka Sikandar, through which, my imagination was captivated by the images of unshaven and angry young man-Amitabh Bachchan and dreamy-eyed Rekha. In the background, there were Bollywood tunes.

At 80, Amitabh Bachchan is the grand old man of Indian cinema - rather, he would be had he not been forever seared into public consciousness as the Angry Young Man that made him a star half a century ago. Through the Seventies and Eighties, Big B made his name playing characters who were fast and furious; revenge was a recurring theme and there was sometimes a righteous kill. There was always an origin story for the fury and in most instances, justice of some sort was dealt out - sometimes by Big B, sometimes to him. On his birthday, five films in which he was angry, angrier, angriest.

It all began with Amitabh Bachchan's first hit film, in which he played an honest police officer named Inspector Vijay Khanna who is jailed on false charges. Once released, he is bent on vengeance on the man behind his imprisonment - who also turns out to be the villain who murdered Vijay's parents when he was young. The evil Teja was played by Ajit.

A trade unionist is blackmailed into to abandon his wife and two young sons, the older of whom, Vijay, bears the brunt of the consequences - his arm is tattooed with the words "mera baap chor hai" (my fatheris a thief). The brothers grow up and pick up opposite sides of the law. Vijay takes to crime, the younger brother Ravi becomes a police officer. Their long-suffering mother has to choose between them and thus the immortal lines from Amitabh Bachchan's Vijay: "Mere paas buildings hain, property hain, bank balance hain, bangla hain, gaadi hain. Tumhare paas kya hai? (I have buildings, property, bank balance, a bungalow, cars. What do you have)?" And it's response from Shashi Kapoor's Ravi: "Mere paas Ma hain (I have mother)."

Again named Vijay, Amitabh Bachchan played the illegitimate son of a wealthy businessman (Sanjeev Kumar) who disowned him and his mother, played by Waheeda Rehman. The adult Vijay is bent on revenge in the form of ruining his father professionally and personally. He weaves a tangled web of ruthless corporate manipulation until his father takes a bullet for him, dying but not before uniting his illegitimate son with his legitimate family.

For once, Amitabh Bachchan was not named Vijay. He begins the film as the good-natured slacker Kallu who is forced to beg his older brother's boss for financial help after said brother loses his arms in a mill accident. Refused help, he breaks into the boss' home to steal money only to be caught and jailed after which he becomes the criminal Kaalia. The older brother dies and Kaalia embarks on a life of crime with the ultimate goal of revenge against the cruel boss, played by Amjad Khan.

No longer young (in fact, quite definitely middle-aged) but still angry, Amitabh Bachchan played one of his best-known Vijays - the son of a village schoolmaster driven by the murder of his father and the attempted rape of his mother, both engineered by underworld don Kancha Cheena (Danny Denzongpa in one his most famous roles). "Poora naam (full name), Vijay Deenanath Chauhan," Amitabh Bachchan intones in the film - it is one of his most iconic lines. Vijay avenges his parents but only be walking a fiery path, the agneepath of the title, through the criminal underbelly of Mumbai.

Though there is nothing unusual for stars of commercial cinema using such compliments to seek favours for promotion of films, Khan stirred a controversy by virtually exonerating Modi of any wrongdoing during an anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002. It followed the burning of a train that left over 50 Hindus died.

He's the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Although he has not been convicted, the BJP government in Gujarat was clearly involved in the mass murders, according to survivors and human-rights groups.

While praising Modi, Khan said that he should not be apologetic for what happened in 2002. This has raised eyebrows of many in the Muslim community, with a section of clerics asking the people to boycott his films. Being a Muslim himself, Khan's statement has added insult to the injury.

One thing that binds these two stars together is their reputation as angry young men and mighty heroes who could singlehandedly fight with many ruffians. In movie houses, they stand up like a rock in front of social evils.

Gurpreet Singh is a Georgia Straight contributor, and the host of a program on Radio India. He's working on a book tentatively titled Canada's 9/11: Lessons from the Air India Bombings. He has a Facebook page called We Are All Untouchables!!!

Gurpreet, the Sikhs that were attacked were millitant that made the golden temple their home, what did they think the Indian government was going to do, sit back and watch, yes what the Indian government did was not correct but the militants shouldn't have taken refuge in the temple. As far as Amitabh Bachan is concerned every man woman has his or her right to believe in what they want just cause Amitabh didn't speak out doesn't mean he's a bad person. Let's fix things within our own home before we go pointing fingers at others. Our religion was meant to be a very peaceful religion and is apart from the few that fear monger or are trying to high jack it.

Looking at this as an outsider, I still believe that a man in such a position as this Amitabh guy is, he should have at least commented by condemning any sort of violence, whether its the attack on the temple, the assassination of Ghandi, or massacre of thousands of sikhs.

As angry farmers marched across the country pleading for their rights; as seething students protested against a leak in the Staff Selection Commission papers; and as Dalits argued vehemently against the perceived dilution of the SC/ST Act 1989, it seemed almost every community had discovered its voice and was no longer content to watch from the sidelines.

On screen, feminine anger exploded with an unexpected ferocity, and in unforeseen ways. In Dhadak, the film that launched the careers of two second-generation stars, it was the young woman who brandished a gun and stood up to her upper caste family, which had problems with her blossoming romance with a lower caste boy.

In the exceedingly-daring Pataakha, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, the anger, which found expression in the hair-pulling and face-scratching, was actually about their unhappiness with life, or what sociologists like to call the post-code lottery. The warring sisters, Badki aka Champa and Chutki aka Genda aka Marigold, have a dream but they find no way through which they can achieve it. Badki wants to run her own dairy business and Chutki wants to learn enough English to perhaps teach it one day.

The delicious twist on the 1970s angry young man was embodied in 2018 by a series of women who reflect the churn in society. Millennial women are far less tolerant of patriarchy than the generation that preceded them. In Mulk, the young Hindu lawyer married to a Muslim businessman cannot understand why her husband suddenly wants to affix the religion of their unborn child. Equally, she cannot bear the injustice of her Muslim father-in-law being questioned for his patriotism. She fights for her family and its honour, against the advice of her parents and her community at large.

In a war of another kind, the daily battle of being in the public eye 24X7, Katrina Kaif plays Babita in Zero, a stoic and permanently drunk superstar, repeatedly let down by the man in her life, an actor named Mr Kapoor (ahem!). She flips the bird at an adoring audience that is waiting for her, kisses a random man on the highway and throws out her boyfriend when she hears, yet again, of his errant ways.

Bharat vasiyon ko aajkal gussa kuchh zyaada hi aa raha hai. We should be a young, happy, smiling nation, working to convert our potential into kinetic energy. A film in any case is meant for entertainment and fun.

N2 - Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond.Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

AB - Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond.Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

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