A joyride through the Dream Factory

In the crackling first chapter of Tamil writer Sujatha’s novel Dream Factory (translated from the original Tamil text by Madhavan Narayanan), we meet Arun Vijay, the 24-year-old reigning superstar of the Madras film industry of the early 1980s. He’s the kind of self- absorbed star who treats everything, even his own stardom, with a kind of complacent coolness, as though he were constantly afraid the mask would slip and people would see how he truly feels about things. Through the worlds Arun walks in and the people he meets, Sujatha weaves an elaborate, entertaining story set in one of the most prolific film industries in India (or indeed, anywhere else).

Sujatha, whose real name was S Rangarajan (1935-208), had a wealth of experience with the real-life Tamil-language film industry. In fact, a number of his novels were adapted into mainstream Tamil movies. He also wrote or co-wrote original stories for a number of films, including Kamal Hassan’s Vikram (1986) the espionage thriller that recently received an eponymous sequel. As a result, his descriptions in Dream Factory have the sheen of an insider’s insights.

This passage, for example, is a superb, tongue-in-cheek introduction to Arun, not only the nature of his stardom but also the kind of man he is in real life.

“After two years of hard make-up, a strange kind of fairness had become frozen on his face. His olive black eyes had a clear tinge of sadness. A melancholy that deceived. The kind of eyes that made thousands of women lose sleep at night in yearning and agony. When his lips smiled, his hesitant eyes would take a while to joint them. There was also a wee sign of a squint. Inside those rosy lips, one tooth also looked a little out of place. There were those who said this was a significant feature of his good looks. Fans loved to discuss these quirks. And there were so many of them. So many. (…) Standing at a height of five feet ten inches, he could look down at his female co-stars from where he could see the parting in their hair. Or peep into their brassieres.”

That last line about Arun’s height is indicative of the entitlement that male superstars of a certain vintage feel. It’s about asserting bodily control over a situation, about underlining power equations empathically (but also, without visible effort for that would defeat the point.

There’s much to admire about Dream Factory and the way it juggles several different kinds of characters, archetypes really, in the context of a cinematic fable. There’s Arumairajan, a classic ‘dreamer’ character who wants to be a lyricist, no matter what it takes. A similar desperation marks the endeavours of Manonmani, although she is closer to her goal: a small-time actress, she is eyeing the top of the ladder and evaluating her next steps. On the other side of the table, so to speak, is someone like Premalatha, the actress who was once at the top of her industry but is slowly fading into obsolescence.

In the Harper Perennial edition, there’s also a fascinating roundtable conversation of sorts, featuring Sujatha alongside the actor Lakshmi, the director Mahendran and the editor of the magazine Ananda Vikatan, who moderated the conversation. At one point, Sujatha explains why he has nothing but disdain for the way Indian film censors functioned in the 1980s, especially regarding silly allusions like the flowers-bumping imagery used to depict kissing.

“What I am trying to say is that the scenes that they do allow are not decent either. There is a couple smooching nose to nose and then the camera pans to show two flowers…here’s where the imagination takes over. I think this is worse than a kissing scene. We need censorship mainly against graphic violence. In Charles Bronson’s movies, he pounds someone and we can hear bones break. I don’t think we can bear that.”

Novels about the silver screen

The American novelist Winston Groom is perhaps best known for his novel Forrest Gump, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning Tom Hanks movie of the same name. But what’s less famous is the fact that following the success of the movie Groom wrote a sequel called Gump and Co. which acknowledges the fact of the movie and Gump’s newfound fame. In fact, the novel begins with Forrest warning the reader never to get mixed up with the movies.

“Let me say this: Everbody makes mistakes, which is why they put a rubber mat around spitoons. But take my word for it – don’t never let nobody make a movie of your life’s story. Whether they get it right or wrong, it don’t matter. Problem is, people be comin up to you all the time, askin questions, pokin TV cameras in your face, wantin your autograph, tellin you what a fine feller you are. Ha! If bullshit came in barrels, I’d get me a job as a barrel maker an have more money than misters Donald Trump, Michael Mulligan, an Ivan Bozosky put together. Which is a matter I will go into in a little bit.”

When it comes to Indian novels where cinema is the main event or the backdrop, two immediately spring to mind: Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007) and Rahi Masoom Raza’s Scene 75 (originally published in 1977, translated into English by Poonam Saxena in 2017, in a Harper Perennial edition). An ambitious novel by any standards, the unconventionally structured Scene 75 follows Ali Amjad, an aspiring screenwriter from Benares trying to make it in Bombay, as well as the colourful group of friends and acquaintances he develops while at it. Raza, an important figure in 20th century Hindi literature, is known for the monumental novel Aadha Gaon, about a rual Indian Shia’s fortunes post-Partition. But he also wrote a number of popular film and TV projects, including the late 80s Doordarshan TV show Mahabharat and the Mithun Chakraborty film Disco Dancer.

The dominant mode of humour in this book is ‘bleakly funny’ but there are passages of sheer levity, too. For example, here Raza describes the struggles undergone by his protagonist while searching for a place to rent in Bombay—he was a Muslim who worked in the movies, a double whammy of sorts while dealing with irate would-be landlords.

“Bloody people don’t give houses to film-wallahs. Bloody people believe that if they give their houses to film-wallahs, the honour of their daughters and daughters-in-law will be in danger. As if their daughters’ and daughters-in-law’s honour is stored away like pickle when the film-wallahs don’t stay in the same building. Arre, it’s all bloody nonsense.”

Along the way, of course, as per usual for Raza’s fictions, the question of Hindu-Muslim relations comes up every now and then. Towards the novel’s midsection we meet Rama, a middle-aged female neighbour of Ali whose bigotry is analysed in great detail by the author. In one particularly revelatory passage, Raza describes how the bigot’s mind leapt from tragedies in Pakistan to (in his eyes, justifiable) violence in India.

“Hating Muslims had become a sort of fashion in north India in those days. Everyone had the number of people killed in Pakistan on their fingertips, and they were so preoccupied with this arithmetic that they had no time to count the corpses lying on the streets of Hindustan. They believed that only Hindu women had honour and Muslim women just had bodies. But even in those days there were a few crazy people here and there, on both sides of the border, who screamed themselves hoarse saying that dead bodies and daggers had no religion, and honour had no identity or caste. But Rama didn’t have even one such crazy person as her neighbour. That’s why no one told Rama that Muslims in India had been killed, just like Hindus in Pakistan.”

In Tabish Khair’s novel Filming (2007) there is a scene where precisely the opposite scenario plays out—in a group of educated, even eccentric men, bigotry creeps in without warning once political tensions around the question of Partition set in (the book is set in the pre-Partition film industry of Bombay). In Barnita Bagchi’s essay ‘The Ironies of Bollywood’, part of the collection Tabish Khair: Critical Perspectives (2014), there is a succinct breakdown of this scene where an actor called Saleem is dismayed by the growing intolerance of his friend circle.

“As a mature actor, Saleem has a highly sociable, somewhat avant-garde group of friends, such as Ashique Painter, Avik Sen, Dr Surender, and Bala. Inhabiting a space of cultural diversity, mingling without any reference to religion, the friends have wonderful times—and innovate in diverse aesthetic fields such as painting, acting, and writing. Slowly, the advent of nationalist politics coloured by religio-political fundamentalism contaminates the cosmopolitan association of the friends, as one finds when a figure such as Avik Sen begins to mouth distrust of “mullahs” and Muslims. When their friend Bala is murdered during a trip to Karachi, Avik Sen is confident that it was a trip to the “Mullah regions” that killed him, while Ashique Painter asks, “how do you know it was a Muslim that killed him?”

Novels like Dream Factory, Scene 75 and Filming are, of course, centred around what we now know as Bollywood. It was and is a highly effective barometer when it comes to the mood of the nation. Socio-political tensions, gender relations, inequality—these novels explore all of these themes almost by proxy because while everything is filtered through cinema and filmmaking, veteran readers/audiences know that for India, the veneer separating these realms from real- world tensions has historically been quite thin indeed.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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