Border In Bollywood Films

The main borders that hold India and its people.To say that our borders hold us together seem a little odd.Normally we think of a border we think of something that divides two places ,such as the border between two states or between two countries .We usually think of borders as geographical lines-dividers that have some kind of physical presence or political meaning.

Bollywood’s transnational mechanisms offer a unique space to study gendered subjectivity. A specific Bollywood movie, English Vinglish (2012) to draw out the profile of the ‘new woman.’ Persistently, I question the ‘new-ness’ to the construction of women when the ‘new’ reiterates the values of tradition, nation, and family. The ‘new’ seems to exist as a particular and unique transaction between local traditions and the global spread of populations that make limiting conceptions of woman, nation, or family, anomalies in a world propelled by expanding market needs and demands. The ‘new’ while offering possibilities for women, concomitantly carries different exclusions based on class, religion, language, and other identities. Understanding the formation of gender under contemporary conditions of transnationalism requires attentiveness to an insidious partnership of possibilities and exclusions that makes it simplistic to think in terms of progress or regress.

Bollywood movies cross physical and cultural borders and form new relationships with the Indian diaspora while moving constantly between tradition and modernity and commenting on the ever-changing lives of Indians at home and abroad.This is an intriguing discourse: if it is true that cinema ‘travels’ with its audience and with the people it represents, popular Hindi films have undoubtedly logged a high number of frequent-flier miles. 

 

 The use of the India-Pakistan border in films such as Main Hoon Na and Veer-Zaara, both released in 2004. These movies invoke border crossing as a possibility and aesthetic pleasure that transcends easy and conservative constructions of Indians and Pakistanis in problematic binary terms.” How is this achieved?  Main Hoon Na offers a spin on the epic Ramayana by recasting the villain Ravana as an Indian named Raghavan who stands for an internal (rather than a foreign) threat to India’s security. The film visually emphasises the similarities between underprivileged people on both sides of the border. Meanwhile, Veer Zaara cleverly blends elements in Indian and Pakistani music to tell the story of a love which eventually transcends the notion of borders. “The border, and the pleasure and problem of how to overcome and cross it effectively, construct an intended relationship of affect with the viewer.

  The Shaad Ali-directed film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007), analysing its presentation of the non-resident Indians living in England and the references the film makes to Hindi cinema of an earlier time – for example, in a scene where a character named Laila is introduced, a version of the rambunctious 1980s song ‘Laila O Laila’ is played in the background. And the 2008 film Dostana about two men who pretend to be gay lovers (played by John Abraham and Abhishek Bachchan), is discussed in terms of the subversion of heterosexual romance in traditional Hindi movies.

r. “These are three related and disjunctive sites at which Bollywood cinema and Bollywood popular culture are consumed [–] nodes on the global circuits of the travels of Bollywood and South Asian popular cultures.

Finally,  Bollywood stars interact with their global audience and ‘perform’ versions of themselves at the intersection of tradition and modernity – so that a performance by the Bachchans as a cosy, traditional family where the young bride Aishwarya Rai Bachchan bends down to touch her mother-in-law’s feet on stage might immediately be followed by her father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan, her husband and herself dancing as a club-dancer and her suitors to the raunchy song ‘Kajara re‘.

“All cinemas offer border places and spaces of ideas, of different sorts, but it is the focus on the imaginative positing of border places and spaces through Bollywood’s idiosyncratic audio-visual construction of such a possibility that is of focus here.”This view is, of course, open to discussion: anyone who believes that good films (whether popular or alternative) deserve serious, engaged analysis might disagree with it. Nonetheless, it is always important to consider the quality of the analytical writing; after all.

 

In this reviewer’s opinion, popular film studies are inherently a good thing: we need more intelligent, engaged literature on commercially successful films and the ways they offer us to look at the world. On the other hand, such writing – rare as it already is – should attempt to be accessible to the reader who has not been nurtured on the hermetically sealed language of academia. 

Regular filmgoers therefore not only encounter Hindi and Urdu, but also develop an awareness and a certain degree of familiarity with samples of other (North) Indian languages. Mixed in with the style and language of Bollywood films there are also various cultural components, and in this configuration they reflect a notion of an Indian national community that, in view of its geographical extent and diversity; is not easy to grasp. 

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Bollywood film, music and dance productions, on the other hand, appear as a popular medium in which a linguistic continuum between sharply delineated individual languages in India is successfully projected, even though the performers' underlying Hindi/Urdu testifies to roots in the family of Indo-European languages, and Bengal and South India have their own flourishing film industry in Bengali and Dravidic respectively. The traditional porosity linguists find in the language boundaries in India is also characteristic of the use of language in the Bollywood films.

 The attitude that individuals of differing regional, cultural and social origin may speak in different ways, but do not therefore necessarily communicate in a foreign language, meaning that one is operating in a linguistic continuum, is based more on a feeling than on a clear awareness of fluid boundaries. Just as English changed in the course of its "indianisation", so Indian national and regional languages do not emerge in the standardised form of a written language, but as variants according to the communicative, economic, religious or cultural contexts. Such flexibility is the characteristic feature of the language of Bollywood. The underlying Hindi acts as an adaptable carrier language which can absorb not only different modes of speech of native speakers, but which can also and effortlessly insert elements from other Indian languages.

With the popularity of the film productions, which has now extended way beyond the sub-continent, Hindi has also achieved a greater spread and acceptance and is at the same time held in higher regard. Campaigns on the part of the Indian government to promote Hindi as a national language, a heavily sanskritised Hindi as used previously in the state media or the Hindi ordered as mandatory in the schools, have not only experienced little success, but have often even been counterproductive: alongside the suspicion that the language was being used to establish a hegemony of the North Indian elite, Hindi was also seen as imposed, sterile and conservative and the instruction in schools often stifled the little natural affinity and enthusiasm still remaining.

In stark contrast, there is Hindi's triumphal procession through the entertainment industry. Nowadays Hindi soap operas from India's supra-regional television companies enjoy record ratings, and Hindi is, alongside English, the most widely used language in advertising and sports programmes, and of course especially in the broadcasting of cricket matches. For the younger audience, various music channels of the television companies at present show almost exclusively video clips with Hindi pop music, gradually displacing foreign English-language numbers. This overwhelming presence of Hindi in all areas of entertainment is due not least to the films produced in Mumbai. As far away as Tamil Nadu, where the most vehement protest against Hindi as a national language have taken place, Hindi films – undubbed – are box-office hits. Almost throughout India the viewers outdo one another with quotes from dialogues and film songs, their rhetoric and poetry having made Hindi into a stylistically more attractive, modern medium for everyday communication.

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As Bollywood films show, the example of India can provide interesting insights into how to handle multilingualism. Here another language is not necessarily seen as a foreign language which can only be learnt with great effort in educational institutions. In particular the life in large Indian cities, and not only there, demonstrates that multilingualism acquired by formal or informal means can be completely normal.

 Most people in India grow up in a multilingual environment, and they know and use more than one language. Without an adequate communicative competency in different languages, it is difficult to survive in the day-to-day social and occupational routine. Instead of a binary relationship between a native and a foreign tongue, as is common in monolingual European societies, a functional multilingualism is frequently cultivated. Although it should be said that often not all the components of the linguistic repertoire are equally well formed, which means that a switching between different languages is necessary according to the subject, situation and partners involved. The aim is not perfection and purity, but the ability to engage in mutual communication.

A border can be defined a place where differences come together,where these are national differences ,cultural and social differences in values and languages ,differences in gender or differences in family heritage or economic status.Whether individual or cultural our identities are constructed by borders racial and ethnic borders ,economic and class borders ,borders of sexuality and gender , and that  separate different levels of community .