For the past two weeks we have been publishing excerpts from the book “Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema” by Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen which explores Muslim-related themes in Bollywood cinema. The last part of the series explores the “new wave” of Muslim-oriented films that have focused predominantly on realistic, social issues. Excerpts from the book expand on this idea: What was the ‘New Wave'? The ‘New Wave' is an umbrella term that actually covers very different filmmaking practices that first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the one hand, it refers to work of an experimental nature that radically challenged the dramatic and story-telling conventions of narrative cinema. On the other hand, the term New Wave has also been used to designate a movement towards cinematic realism, and it is this realist movement of the New Wave that bears upon the films under consideration here. At the moment of its emergence in 1969, the New Wave, though marked by divergent aesthetic practices, was united in its opposition to the entertainment idioms and motivations of mainstream cinema, and was therefore directed at all that the mainstream cinema ignored, erased or repressed. Among the many themes of the exploitation of the poor, the oppressive nature of neo-feudal traditions and family life, and a general emphasis on the lives and struggles of ordinary people, the condition of Muslims in post-Partition India emerged as an area of crucial concern. While New Wave filmmakers also addressed family life and family ties that was the hallmark of the Classic Muslim Social earlier, they eschewed the representation of an idealized nawabi culture that had formed the earlier genre, a cinematic imaginary that by the 1960s had precious little connection to lived experience and was largely, if not wholly, fictitious. In contrast, the focus of the New Wave filmmakers fundamentally shifted to the exploration of ordinary working and middle-class existence that was framed through the prism of the larger social, political and historical forces that shaped the destiny of Muslim families. In sharp contrast to the worries about loss of honor and status in the lives of a small Lakhnawi elite, the New Wave addressed the social discrimination, economic deprivation and communal violence that ordinary Muslims faced on an everyday level. As a result, in the work of the New Wave, the genre of the Muslim Social was radically transformed in its look, in its feel and in many of the social issues addressed by it. The centrality of history In the case of Muslim social life, the salient history for modern times has been first of all the experience of Partition in the immediate aftermath of British withdrawal from South Asia. For the large minoritarian Muslim population in India, the fallout of the Partition continued in the social and economic discrimination felt by Muslims that was reinforced by bursts of communal conflict. This was a history largely absent from the commercial screen. The centrality of history to the New Wave Muslim Socials is strikingly manifest in M.S. Sathyu's “Garm Hawa”, which burst on the screen with images of the cataclysm of the Partition and the death of Gandhi. The family of Salim Mirza is divided from the beginning by the Partition as one part of it leaves for Pakistan. The stability of the family business is undermined by migrations from and to Pakistan, and by the cut-throat competition that exploits the lack of trust between the different communities. Eventually, the family is forced to give up their ancestral home The evocation of the Partition by “Garm Hawa” 25 years after the event not only broke a silence around the pain of the past, but also drew attention to the forces of communalism that had not ended with the Partition. Saeed Mirza's “Naseem” is set in the contemporary moment of the build-up to the demolition of the Babri Mosque on Dec. 6, 1992. Yet the pervasive anxiety that informs the lives of the Muslim family depicted in the film as they gather around the television to obtain news on the increasing communal tension in the country generated by the Hindu right-wing mobilization at Ayodhya for the demolition of the Babri Mosque is tempered by touching moments of conversation between the granddaughter, Naseem, and the grandfather, Dadajaan. During these conversations he narrates to her, through qissas (stories) and via flashbacks, memories of gentler times before the Partition when inter-community friendships had space to exist and to flower. In Shyam Benegal's “Mammo” (1994) written by Khalid Mohamed, the significance of not allowing traumatic memories of the past destroy the ability to move on and embrace life is reasserted. The grown-up Riyaz comes to maturity as a writer by sympathetically inhabiting the life of his aunt Mammo, and comes to understand her experience of loss and separation through his own experiences. Gender roles transformed The norms of Muslim life depicted in the three genres we have described in this book are deeply patriarchal. However, the two films that Khalid Mohamed wrote for Shyam Benegal, “Mammo” and “Sardari Begum” (1996), before he wrote and directed his own “Fiza” (2000), are particularly trenchant in their criticism of patriarchal culture. Mammo, the feisty heroine of Benegal's film, is in many ways a proto-feminist. Her struggle against the injustice of territorial borders that defy the wishes of the human heart is also a struggle against patriarchal injustice to women. Mammo's most audacious flouting of the norms of patriarchy and a patriarchal state is the manner in which, faced by the repeated humiliations of violent deportation she endures in view of her Pakistani nationality, she devises her own solution to being with Fayyazi and Riyaz in Bombay. That gender questions are crucial to the New Wave Muslim Social is evidenced by other films too. Sagar Sarhadi's 1982 film “Bazaar” takes up the condition of poor Muslim women in Hyderabad who are sold in marriage to older men in the Gulf who need companions while they are away from their families at home. Big-budget cinema Writer–director Khalid Mohamed is an important figure to consider in assessing the influence of the New Wave idioms on mainstream cinema. Having written three films on Muslim women for Shyam Benegal – “Mammo”, “Sardari Begum” and “Zubeida” (2000), – Mohamed's work is deeply imbued with the concerns and forms of the New Wave. At the same time, “Fiza”, his debut film as a director, works within the framework of mainstream, commercial cinema, adapting its melodramatic conventions and star personae to the issues and concerns of the New Wave. Karisma Kapoor plays a feisty, independent-minded heroine in the film. Her central motivation in the film is to uncover the truth and to confront men who occupy and manipulate their positions of social authority. The Indian film industry since the mid-1990s has been undergoing a rapid process of transformation. While an occasional Muslim Historical like “Jodhaa Akbar” may be produced, it seems that the transformations wrought by the New Wave upon the genre of the Muslim Social in the broader context of industrial change have effectively brought the genre to an end as a distinctive mode of address.
