Mother India explores the tortured relationship between mother and son, whereas Mughal-E-Azam narrates a difficult father-son tale. The comparison may not be fair, but it’s intriguingly worth drawing a parallel. If Mother India gave us the matriarch, whose strong imagery would later impact the entire career of Salim-Javed (Deewaar, most notably, with Nirupa Roy ultimately shooting her son Vijay played by Amitabh Bachchan, has shades of Mother India), Mughal-E-Azam (1960) evoked the patriarchal personification, with Prithviraj Kapoor as a powerful father figure obsessed with controlling the twin destinies of his love-struck son (Dilip Kumar as Prince Salim) and the Mughal kingdom of Hindustan. The Guardian’s Philip French, a legendary critic, dubbed Mother India as the “relentlessly upbeat tractor-musicals of the Soviet cinema that Stalin so much admired.” No wonder, Nehruvian-era stars like Nargis and Raj Kapoor enjoyed great popularity in Soviet Russia. Shantaram made his reformist classic Do Aakhen Barah Haath, Dilip Kumar tested (and perfected) his Bhojpuri in Naya Daur, Dev Anand had two enduring musical hits in Paying Guest and Nau Do Gyarah and who can forget Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, from whose poetic pessimism a whole generation of filmmakers have quenched their creative thirst? Ask Shyam Benegal, Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra or Imtiaz Ali. For example, it was 1957’s Tumsa Nahin Dekha that saved Shammi Kapoor from an agonising also-ran status endured by a later-generation Kapoor like Rajiv Kapoor. It gave us songs, dialogues, stars, moments and memories that still haunt us. The annus mirabillis ushered in many trends. 1957 was the golden age, if there ever was one. Made in 1957, Hindi cinema’s very own 1939, Mehboob Khan’s weepie stars Nargis, Raaj Kumar, Sunil Dutt and Rajendra Kumar. Whether you find it regressive or progressive, relevant or redundant, Mother India is the mother of all melodramas. Here’s a long-suffering, ordinary village woman, played with masterful force-of-nature resolve by Nargis (astonishingly, she was all of 28) who went on to notch up an iconic imagery and became, over time, a symbol of the typical Indian woman.
Mother India, which finds a spot in our list of 10 dramas to watch in your lifetime, is a shining example of the kind of kitschy melodrama that Indians of certain vintage loved and still do. In Bollywood, there’s also the historical tendency to turn drama into melodrama.
Author and Bard expert Jonathan Gil Harris likes to say that if “Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for Bollywood.” In an essay for The Hindu, Harris draws a link between the Bard’s masala style of writing, with its dramatic twists and turns and tragedy followed quickly by comedy and Bollywood’s masala movies with their own special ingredients of drama, humour, emotions and all the spicy embellishments that make Hindi cinema both distinct from the rest of its Western counterparts and much-mocked. By that logic, even Shakespeare would sound corny today. Even many within India, especially the young weaned on the recent export of world cinema, have become leery of the word ‘drama.’ And yet, one of the chief pleasures of Hindi cinema is the very drama that the so-called informed viewers find cheesy. Take a look at our pick of top ten Bollywood dramas.īollywood is good at churning out dramas that Western audiences find routinely unwatchable.