Bombay Bhai: The Gangster in and behind Popular Hindi Cinema

Abstract

In The Tao of Cricket, his witty analysis of the role the ostensibly British game has played within modern Indian culture and consciousness, Ashis Nandy compares cricket to detective fiction, “another mode of cultural self-expression which became popular in Britain during the late Victorian period and was later introduced into a number of Indian languages by enterprising imitators, but which [unlike cricket] failed to take root.” Although both popular diversions share some functions, for Nandy the “conflicts which exist in cricket at a fundamental level—cricket as a science versus cricket as an art, cricket as a display of individual flourish versus cricket as team work, the cricketer as a specialist versus the cricketer as part of a community—become shallower in the thriller” (Nandy 2000, 32). Because the classic detective story poses and then logically solves a puzzle, it trades only in outer conflicts, rather than the inner conflicts that, according to Nandy, are the genuine agony and ecstasy of cricket for its devoted fans. But even if the classic detective story failed to secure a place in Indian popular culture, “as we know,” Nandy reminds us, “the popular Indian understanding of transgression and responsibility—of crime and punishment—is reflected not so much in the vernacular detective thriller as in the thrilling popular cinema which has an entirely different set of psychological properties” (31–32).

MM: I want to make another film. Sanjay [Dutt] said I should make a film based on your life. CS: Accha [Good], we’ll discuss this at leisure. MM: 100 per cent. I want a story …just give me a story. CS: Yeah, yeah. I’ll definitely give you a couple of sequences …

—Bombay film director Mahesh Manjrekar in recorded phone conversation with underworld boss Chhota Shakeel, November 14, 2000