Bhool Bhulaiya: Bollywood’s Retro Conservativsm

I just finished watching one of Bollywood’s mega hits of 2007: Bhool Bhulaiya. The production values were fantabulous . . . Bollywood certainly doesn’t suffer from underfunded cinema budgets. The movie opens with a young Indian prince returning home from (where else?) America with his mod scod wife to take up residence in his haunted palace, much to the horror of his extended family. I settled in for 4 hours of the normal Bollywood flick with anticipation: the lovely Vidya Balan played the modern wife, the prince was suitably good looking, there was a lovely, romantic musical number in the start. (KK, love your voice!)

But as the movie wore on, I began to feel shock. Could it be that India, after a vigorous feminist movement, India, the country of heroines like Arundhati Roy and ladies of the Narmada Dam campaign, is regressing to reactionary antidiluvianism? The ghost of a mistreated dancer from generations past seems to strike and things start going horribly wrong, especially to the young princess. The Levi-clad, laptop-comfy prince obviously doesn’t believe in supernatural hoo-haa. He does apparently believe in prosecution on suspicion, accusing his jilted cousin (’cause, losing a hot guy like him is enough to drive any chick psychotic). Next, a famous Indian American psychiatrist—Akshay Kumar going for comedy but coming off as buffonish—is called in to treat the cousin. On his expert advice, she is then shunned by her family and locked up in a room. And when we are treated to a indigestible psychological explanation for how it’s the young princess who is possessed by the ghost of the murdered dancer, there is painful sequence in which a pundit called in for exorcism actually strikes the crazed lady with a stick. That sound you hear? That’s The Feminist Mystique going up in flames.

India is trying to recreate the ideal Aryan culture that it believes it lost with the coming of Islam to India (a narrative processed straight from the history books of British Orientalists). I’m from that part of the world and have been watching Hindi movies forever, but now, I actually have to read the subtitles. Not that it’s surprising, what with Bollywood being one of the major vehicles to Sanskritize the language of the subcontinent. But with the culture and traditions, patriarchy is also making a comeback. This is where you have women touch their husbands’ feet in a recognition of their godhead (as in, pati dev), where lower classes deferred the value of their whole existence to the comfort and desires of the upper castes, and where respect for parents is conflated to a situation in which they have an unhealthy degree of influence in their children’s lives: Ekta Kapoor’s soap serials, anyone?

Traditional forms of authority are given uncritical validation. In Bhool Bhulaiya, you have an ecstatic ceremony for the prince’s return, where all the villagers turn out to watch the royal return to his palace in a carriage drawn by a white horse and get coronated with a diamond decked turban. That’s really nice, except India is apparently a democracy. And his wife, before the musical number says something that roughly translates as: “I’m so blessed you have made this unworthy thing [nacheez] to be your Rani.” I’m blessed I didn’t have dinner before I started watching this flick or it would have gone through an unpleasant trajectory.

With the separation of India and Pakistan, both nations have tried to turn their back on what was a brilliant shared culture and tried to ethnicize their shared heritage. So, here, you have Gandhi-esque pastoral scenes of village pundits meditating under trees, rituals at the holy river Ganga (presumably . . . its nice that the prince’s state is located in a part where the Ganga flows through), Bengali dance sequences, all set in the backdrop of Mughal architecture with those unmistakable arches and embellished wall paintings. There’s also the obligatory Muslim song sequence, where Muslim forms of worship are portrayed in an elaborate (and usually ritualistically wrong) sequences that serves to exoticize and other Islam: setting Islam apart as something strange and foreign, not a force that was integrated with the very fabric of the subcontinent for hundreds of years. Only as far back as Umrao Jaan and Pakeezah, Hindi films represented Indian Muslims with a naturalism that could only come from home. Now, we’re a fashion that’s slated to go out of date.

For me, Bhool Bhulaiya is exactly what the name suggests; something that deserves bhool-jana (forgetting).