What is a white and gold cake, but the confectionery version of a movie producer in monochromatic outfit, holding a yellow and gold pack of 555 cigarettes. Yaniki, guzra zamana.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Karan Johar turned 50 and, like a truly good old Bollywood movie, there was something poignant about the moment, not only because many of his party guests, who redefined youth for a new, post-liberalisation India, are now elders.
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The party was like a Farah Khan song, a homage to his own origins in a Bollywood capacious enough for multi-starrers, multi-sequins, every kind of excess— emotional, musical, sexual—and a whole lotta affectionate, subversive space for bad taste. What is a white and gold cake, but the confectionery version of a movie producer in monochromatic outfit, holding a yellow and gold pack of 555 cigarettes. Yaniki, guzra zamana.
The one thing that Bollywood was not, was respectable. A hard place for women, but also a queer place, where relationships, sex and glamour messed with bhadralok good taste.
This snuck into middle-class homes through the tabloid universe of Stardust, Filmfare, Star n’ Style and Cine Blitz, a forbidden world explosive with libido and political incorrectness, that gave rise to a new vocabulary of Hinglish, romance and glamour and gave ideas to some of its ardent readers (like, ahem, me). Bindas or bust baby.
Koffee with Karan was Stardust for the age of satellite TV. The gossipy bits were Neeta’s Natter and the rapid fire round like Stardust’s slam-book style These Are A Few of My Favourite Things column. Its gossipy camp, where affairs were discussed boldly, exes were mocked, fashion was forward and gay jokes were legion, let some of these ideas out from under the covers and into family rooms, where scandal gave way to acceptance.
As we talk in public about what is not allowed, those things do become “normal” or ordinary. As we spoke more about Bollywood in mainstream spaces, as black money gave way to corporate money, pedigreed and middle-class women entered the space more easily. Queer innuendo gave way to LGBT movies— though the jury’s out on if that’s good or not. Song and dance were eased out. Now, a world which did not allow daughters to work, launches their movies. Where men did not marry actresses because they were “tainted”— unless they quit and became invisible—we see intriguing new pairings, between women of liberal elite, artsy backgrounds with Bollywood men, like Aamir Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Abhay Deol. In a way it signals the fading of a certain masculinity, where glamour and sizzle come more from these women than the men, but also, where an English-speaking world, far less desi in consistency and taste, far more interested in political correctness, has become aspirational.
Inclusions that become permissible, create their own exclusions, as Kangana Ranaut might want to remind you. A friend laughed to me, “a party in which everyone and everyone’s exes were invited,” How mature, how mellow, how sigh. But not everyone, yaniki Kartik Aaryan. He was at his own party, namely the cover of Filmfare which declared that the Era of Kartik had begun. It is not only that a certain decentering is at work in Bollywood. Bollywood itself is no longer squarely in the centre. But nor is it at the untidy edge, from which new things come. The media landscape is wider and wilder, churned by influencer economies and regional industries, because zamane ka kaam hai guzarna. The rose has slightly lost its bloom, though its blowsy beauty will always be special.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at [email protected]
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