Abstract
Filmmaking in the industrial township of Malegaon, affectionately referred to by the locals as Maliwood, is known for its spoofs of popular Hindi and Hollywood films. “Maliwood” has become an almost parallel film industry based on local creativity and minimal infrastructure deriving from informal and nonlegal media economies involving video cassette theaters and stores, and the circulation of video compact discs (VCDs) and digital videodiscs (DVDs). In this article, I track the formation of the Malegaon Film Industry as a localized filmmaking practice by charting the relay between the local industry, Hindi cinema, the various documentaries made on Malegaon, and the current TV series Malegaon Ka Chintu (2010–present) shot by people from Malegaon and produced by Sab TV in Bombay. Through the case study of Malegaon, the article attempts to track the journey of the town from an informal local industry to something that is being drawn into more formal industrialized patterns of production and distribution.
A man is seen walking on an elevated stone surface asking his minions, “Kitne aadmi the?” (How many men were they?) The minions answer—“Do aadmi the, Sarkar” (two men, boss). In what seems like a small theater, an all male audience sit watching intently as what appears to be a rerun of the iconic Hindi film Sholay (Sippy, 1975) is projected. The man turns his head and says “suar ke baccho” (swine). A close-up of his face reveals that this is a look-alike enacting the role of Gabbar Singh. 1 The film is Malegaon Ki Sholay (Nasir, 2000), a spoof in which Gabbar becomes Rubber and Basanti is called Basmati. 2 Made on a budget of ₹ 50,000, Malegaon Ki Sholay, earned ₹ 1 lakh, making a 100 percent profit and providing an impetus to the alternative spoof film industry of Malegaon (Joshi, 2009). Malegaon as distinctive film economy came to national prominence in 2008 with Faiza Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon, which tracked the making of Malegaon ka Superman (Nasir, 2008).
In this article, I focus on the Malegaon Film industry or Maliwood 3 as it is affectionately referred to by the locals, an industry known for its spoofs of popular Hindi and Hollywood films. The intricacies of Maliwood can be observed in the relay between the local industry, Hindi Cinema, the various documentaries made on Malegaon, and the current TV series Malegaon Ka Chintu (2010–present) shot by people from Malegaon and produced by Sab TV in Bombay.
Googling Malegaon yields an equal distribution on its social and political profile, most notably its communal history and bomb blasts, and its alternative spoof film industry. The town is situated roughly 296 kilometers away from Mumbai, a nondescript place with a largely poor Muslim majority population and a powerloom weaving industry in crisis. It has made headlines for the post-1993 Babri Masjid riots and has also been much discussed for the 2006 bomb blasts (Gupta, 2012). Malegaon’s proximity to Mumbai has also had an impact on its social fabric. Mumbai’s evolution from a manufacturing hub in the 1960s to a global financial services sector today has shaped peripheral urban clusters, such as, Bhiwandi, Madhavpur, and Malegaon. The Bombay Textile strike of 1982–1983, led by trade union leader Datta Samant and involving some 2.3 lakh workers from over 60 mills, was fueled by a demand for an increased bonus and wages (Bakshi, 1986). The resulting decline in mill production led to an increase in production by handlooms and powerlooms, and made Maharashtra into a powerloom center of the country. Production was subcontracted to powerloom owners located in towns, such as, Malegaon, with an estimated 84,000 looms. The powerloom boom created employment opportunities but also led to inhuman living and working conditions: thousands of people sleeping in ramshackle sheds with poor electricity, water supply, toilet facilities, and ventilation, and children working for long hours (Wersch, 1992). The minimum wage is ₹ 2,000 as against a stipulated minimum of ₹ 3,000. Of Malegaon’s population of 7 lakhs, almost 75 percent are Muslim. The town has now become a huge, communally polarized pool of cheap labor, largely unprotected by laws and without any proper civic facilities (Philipose, 2005).
In the economically depressed, conflict-ridden Malegaon, the fantastical world of cinema offers the local people a refuge from their harsh reality. Nitin Sukhija, who made the documentary, Malegaon Ki Sholay (2005) points that what struck him the most on his first encounter with Malegaon was the town’s fascination with films.
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There are fan clubs everywhere, and every Friday after Jumma namaaz, there is a stampede outside the theaters. The town fervently watches Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Chan, old movies, dubbed movies, and little-known B and C international releases every Friday at the local video parlor.
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Commenting on Malegaon’s cine love, a local remarks,
There is continuous communal tension. So people stick to their sides (referring to Hindu and Muslim parts of town), and never cross over. They are scared. But they love films, both sides.
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The video parlor also screens locally made remakes of Hollywood and Bollywood films adapted to a storyline centered on the town and featuring local look-alikes in a shoestring production. These films employ the local Khandeshi accent in their dialogues.
S.V. Srinivas (2003), tracking the circulation of the Hong Kong action film in Andhra Pradesh, notes how an obsessive engagement with Hong Kong movies spills over into practices beyond cinema halls, citing martial arts schools and academies, detective fiction and self-help books. Local stars are also known to train in martial arts and perform their own stunts. For Srinivas, this type of circulation and appropriation suggests a realm of democratic promise. We may observe a similar spillover in the Malegaon context. In the documentary Supermen of Malegaon, for ₹ 4 one can get a Titanic or Shahrukh Khan kite and for ₹ 6 an Amitabh Bachchan kite. The Shahrukh Khan haircut at a local barber’s costs less than the Sanjay Dutt one (₹ 101 as opposed to ₹ 150) as the latter requires more styling, with more hair at the back. The boy performing sleight-of-hand tricks in the street names his pebbles Sridevi, Aishwarya Rai, and Rani Mukherji. 7 Malegaon’s humor goes beyond the screen as neighborhoods in the town sport names, such as, Suddenly Place and Tension Square. Black humor has named a local river “Falling” as many children have drowned in it. 8
Bombay cinema combines with local context in the fashioning of spoof remakes. When the Oscar-nominated Lagaan (2001, dir. Ashutosh Gowariker) became Malegaon Ki Lagaan, the issue of colonial tax was replaced with a focus on civic amenities, reflected in the replacement of lyrics of Lagaan’s popular song “Ghanan, Ghanan” with the words “paani toh tapka de, badboo aaye badboo aaye, kahe kapde badal badal” (Pour the tap water/our clothes are stinking/asking to be changed). 9
These films offer an escape from daily drudgery and become a window to the dreams and aspirations of this small town. Shakeel Bharti, writer-filmmaker of Malegaon notes:
Theatres are packed on Fridays and the powerlooms are closed. A worker is exhausted after a week of hard work at the looms. His mind is numb so he watches a film on Friday, surrenders his consciousness and imagines himself on the screen. Trades his reality for fantasy.
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However, in the opinion of Sridhar Raghavan, a writer of the Bombay film industry, these films are not just spoofs, rather they are homages and a work of love:
It’s a place where violence and horror and danger co-exist with such a wonderful sense of irony and humor. The films are a real labor of love by people who really care for the original films. It’s not a spoof by any standard, homage would be a better word. It’s not like a Mad magazine version. I find them really inventive and creative.
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Filmmaking Practices in Malegaon
As a background to discussing filmmaking in Malegaon, we should note how the post-economic liberalization period witnessed the proliferation of nonlegal media practices, with the rise of local cable television and film and music piracy opening up contested networks of production, circulation, and consumption. The access to new technologies has moved film and music into informal markets. The local circuits of digitally based economies have opened up new industrial spaces. As Ravi Vasudevan (2010) observes, there is a growing production of digital films produced in Mumbai, Manipur, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh. These circuits are probably not entirely distinct from that of the larger film industry. In some instances, actors and technicians are caught between the local setup and the circuits operating in Bombay. But these currents have a
distinctive engagement with their specific markets and audiences, and point to a complex entanglement of cinema and cheap digital forms.
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For example, Daljit Ami’s (2006) work on films produced in Punjab focuses on two strands: films made on celluloid that address the global market and highlight emotional dilemmas, such as, emigration and films made in the digital format that engage local audiences and focus on socioeconomic crisis. These low-budget films are produced in large numbers, and using “rustic language and cheap comedy as its key feature” are popular with the theater community in Punjab (Ami, 2006). They also adapt popular Hindi films, such as, Mughal-e-Azam and Sholay, and tailor them to cater to local audiences. For some, including technicians, actors, and investors, production of digital films provide an opportunity to hone skills and develop industrial awareness in their bid to enter Bombay. In Manipur, Ranjan Yumnam (2007) has shown how digital cinema facilitated a new film economy in the wake of decline in celluloid film supply and on the basis of quicker and more economical production. The coming of new digital camera technologies has revitalized the movie theaters in Manipur as these films are completed within a period of 15 days and are made on a small budget of ₹ 5–6 lakhs. Neikolie Kuotsu (2010) makes a connection between these new Manipur digital films and the “Bombay formula” films of the 1970s–1980s in their use of family melodrama, cinematic language, and song-and-dance routine replicated in local meadows and valleys. Kuotso argues that this cinema carefully negotiates local politics and cultural conventions, especially illustrated in the way women are used to represent Manipuri ethos and values.
Similar developments are also taking place in Ladakh and Meerut. In Ladakh, the coming of the Internet, liquid-crystal display (LCD) projectors, and portable speakers has given birth to a cinema in which the local population acts and directs. As Bombay cinema is deemed “racy” (The Indian News, 2009) by the Ladakhi population, their films deal with a local culture that was felt to be under siege by Hindi films. In Meerut, a town with a strong religious divide, a parallel industry of music video and local films has emerged. The Hindu side of the town produces music videos that are fashioned along the lines of the item song, while the Muslim part produces films that are shot on a theater-like stage. 13
These new film economies share common features, negotiating relations between local cultures and the larger film economy. Local circuits adapt plot structures and song-and-dance sequences of Hindi cinema to the local culture and landscape, there is a to and fro of local directors, producers, technicians, and actors between local industries and Bombay. Films draw on local practices (such as, theater, linguistic idioms, and music), and carefully negotiate local and regional politics, such as, the insurgency in Manipur or the communal divide in Meerut.
In Film History: Theory and Practice, Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery (1985) point to the importance of local histories for film historical investigation. Here, they gesture to the functioning of films in a given community. On the other hand, Vanessa Toulmin and Martin Loipendinger (2005) argue that the idea of the local ranges from focuses on local exhibition, local screenings of national or international cinema, and the local versus the national. For my purpose, what is particularly suggestive is the definition of a film as local when there is a considerable overlap between the people appearing in the film and those who watch it or were intended to watch it. The central drive of this idea of the local is that of self-recognition. This moment of recognition can be of a personage to whom one is emotionally attached, a locality, or local scenes, and the spectator’s gaze projected back to them. Here, I track the formation of the Malegaon film industry as a localized filmmaking practice, the people associated with it, the transformations that have taken place in the industry, and its interaction with a universe of film/media practices that include not only Bombay cinema but also documentary and television.
To map the disjunctive flows of cultural and technological travels, I draw on Nestor Garcia Canclini’s (1995, pp. 230–231) work on cross-border economic and cultural transactions. Canclini interrogates the one-directional schema of imperialist dominion in the wake of the new flows of cultural circulation unleashed by the relocation of Latin Americans to the United States and Europe. He cites the example of the kind of cultural production in the border areas between Mexico and United States, such as, Tijuana where migrations take place daily and cultural identities are fluid and hybrid. Two notions are destabilized in the process—first, the notion of a community understood in its sense of territorial identification and second, a concentric notion of core to periphery with a landscape of social asymmetry. In line with the example of Tijuana Canclini points out that the “hybridity” of Tijuana’s culture may be seen in its bilingual nature, reflected in the music and the posters as well as artistic and literary production. This process of “deterritorialization” refers to an unsettling of not merely physical geography but also a cultural geography. There is also a simultaneous and contradictory process of reterritorialization in which different groups try to fix their identities through signs and rituals to particular places to differentiate themselves from others. Canclini notes that such processes throw up competing notions of hybridity and identity, the negotiation of which makes the sites of power decentered and multidetermined. Canclini’s approach has helped me in charting out the complex flows and power dynamics that have emerged in the context of the local (Malegaon in proximity to Bombay), the national (Bombay Cinema, television productions), and the global (Hollywood, international documentary productions).
Malegaon Times
Malegaon Ki Sholay, the first spoof film made in Malegaon in 2000, started the tradition of the town watching its own “of the people, by the people, for the people” (Joshi, 2009) films every Friday in their local neighborhood video parlors. Irfan Iliyas an actor and Akram Khan, actor, director, editor, cinematographer, and dubbing artist, trace the origins of this film culture to the local practice of stage plays. Every week, a group of interested locals would come together and write an original dramatic script that would address local issues, 14 but always inject a dose of comedy, foreshadowing devices that would become familiar in Malegaon films.
The story of how these films began suggest features of informality, of pleasure and playfulness based on local friendship and sociality. Sheikh Nasir, the “Dadasaheb Phalke” of Malegaon, and his friends were in the “marriage video” business, using cheap PD 170 video cameras. One night as they sat and chatted, the idea of remaking Sholay (Sippy, 1975) caught their fancy. They gathered the town’s Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Amjad Khan, and Sanjeev Kumar look-alikes to act in the film. Commenting on the choice of using comedy/parody for the film, Sheikh Nasir says,
I realized that people still loved Charlie Chaplin even though its 50 years old. But no one likes action or horror films from that period. Comedy from back then is still a hit. A comedy lasts forever, its eternal. That’s why I decided to make Sholay (1975) a comedy film.
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The video parlor emerges as a major site of circulation for the Malegaon films. After a film is made, a censor certificate is acquired from Mumbai and the film is shown every Friday when workers have an off day from work. Sheikh Nasir, who directed the first Malegaon film, owned the most important of Malegaon’s 14 video theaters as it was in the heart of the town and attracted a large audience.
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The popular demand for these films led local distributors and cable channels to pick them up. Jayesh Bhai, proprietor of Krunal Music states,
We benefit by the fact that less money is involved. We get original comedy projects for a very low price and they (film makers) benefit because they get more work and money to setup their industry.
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Irfan Ali, cable operator, echoes a similar sentiment and adds,
Everybody calls us and asks us to play Malegaon films. These films are in popular demand and here the boys are heroes.
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Lawrence Liang (2009) has pointed out that the Malegaon phenomenon is quite similar to the emergence of Nollywood in Nigeria. As Brian Larkin has shown in his book Signal and Noise (2008), Nollywood came up on the basis of a prior history of pirate video circulation of imported films that provided the infrastructure for a powerful and extensive film industry generating local film content. Infrastructure is a key category in this analysis. For Larkin, infrastructure refers to,
both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures, whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and building people into collectivities. (Larkin, 2008, pp. 5–6)
Thus, according to Larkin, technical systems (transport, communication, and urban planning) as well as cultural systems (such as, knowledge of a particular language, religious learning, and performance of a cultural style) were key to the development of social and cultural production. In Malegaon, technical systems were composed of video cameras, video recorders, and tape recorders for editing and lip syncing, computers, sound mixers, printing facilities, video parlors for exhibition, and, as we shall see, motorcars, bicycles, toy helicopters, and bullock carts that constituted a low-tech base to produce action, spectacle, and special effects. Cultural systems that constituted Malegaon film practice drew upon stage plays, marriage video experience, and also from a practice of self-instruction through film viewing, especially of Hollywood films. As Sheikh Nasir states,
I never went anywhere to learn films. I would select different English films to screen. After that, I found Hindi films boring. “Weak direction,” I thought. So my film education was at the video hall, I learnt master angles, master lighting, the works.
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As important as considering what constitutes an infrastructure for such local practices is the way these infrastructures are liable to break down and how such breakdown is managed through low-tech resources. Brian Larkin (2008) argues that
if infrastructure represents attempts to order, regulate and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their operations, or the rise of provisional or informal infrastructures, highlight the failure of that ordering and the recording that takes it place.
Here, I am interested in how breakdown and unavailability of infrastructure produces an artisanal form of innovation in film practice. The hydrargyrum medium arc-length iodide (HMI) lights, a staple in the mainstream industry, are replaced by basic lights and the use of a round reflector covered with cotton cloth. In Malegaon Ki Sholay, the iconic chase sequence at the end was shot on a local transport bus in counterpoint to the train used in Sholay and Gabbar’s henchmen chase Jai and Veeru on bicycles instead of horses (see image 1). The sound used for song-and-dance sequences is recorded first on a tape recorder, which is then played live on set to which the actors synchronize their lip movement. The dubbing is done by one or two local artistes with the help of a mike and a computer. In Malegaon Ki Shaan, for Shakaal’s revolving table a painted cartwheel was used. Two men were hidden under it to revolve the table (see image 2). They also needed to shoot a helicopter sequence for the film. Due to financial constraints, a toy helicopter was used. The illusion of size was achieved through two shots. The first shot was a close up of the helicopter against the blue sky with a tight frame. In the second shot, the helicopter placed on a rock was in the foreground and walking at a far distance behind it, in soft focus were two men dressed in white, the frame here again is kept very tight (see image 3). The response to these innovations was ecstatic. The audience went wild, termed it a spectacle, and kept coming back to watch these sequences.
In The Practice of Everyday life, Michel DeCertau (1984) distinguishes between strategy and tactics. Strategy belongs to the purview of power. Tactics are not a subset of strategy but a democratic response to it. It is the purview of the non-powerful who adapt to the environment created by the strategists and navigate the environment that is set for them. Malegaon filmmakers may be said to operate tactically, innovating to manage the lack of access to proper infrastructure, amenities, or finance. For example, the film Malegaon Ki Lagaan was made on a reported budget of ₹ 30,000 and financed by S.S. Aire, the local assistant wireman for the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB). Aire says,
My monthly income is Rs 6000, I have put in more than Rs 60,000 in these films. I have taken a loan to make this film for the boy. (The Times of India, 2006)
The boy in question is Aire’s son. Aire agreed to finance the movie on the condition that his son would get to act in the film and play the main role instead of the town’s Aamir Khan look-alike. Farogh Jafri, the filmmaker and screenwriter agreed to the first demand and refused the second “on creative grounds” (The Times of India, 2006). Malegaon Ki Lagaan is set in 1935 and has an Englishman asking the vegetarian king of Malegaon to swallow an egg and threatening to cut the power supply if he refuses. When the king refuses and the Englishmen are about to execute their threat, Aamir challenges them to a cricket match. The “fair” boys of the town played the Englishmen, and “fair” girls from Mumbai were employed to play the part of the Englishwomen. When the Aamir Khan look-alike finally arrived, the filmmaker Farogh lamented, “My Aamir looks like Ajay Devgan” (The Times of India, 2006). Many adjustments and accommodations had to be made. The cinematographer worked as wedding cameraman and would not turn up for the shoot whenever he got a wedding assignment. As for the casting, some actors paid money to get a part, while others agreed to participate because of the free food that was offered. The editing was done with the help of a videocassette recorder (VCR). In this process, the system consisted of a TV screen and two VCR machines. In the first machine, the recorded footage tape was loaded and on the second a blank video cassette was loaded to record the edited sequences. The editing was done by switching on the pause button simultaneously on both machines for the chosen footage. Bullock carts and bicycles (see image 4 and image 5) were used for the crane and trolley shoots. Some of the carnivalesque dimensions of the film shoot are suggested by the performance of the song-and-dance sequence, with the song blasting from a prerecorded tape and the scene watched by the entire village which also consisted of women.
Labor and Aesthetic Desire
In his book Nights of Labor, Jacques Ranciere (2006) makes a direct link between aesthetic desire and labor. It was during his exploration of the labor archives in France that Ranciere stumbled upon workers who hated their factory work. These workers wanted to be creative and produce art. Thus, they worked during the day and produced poetry, music, and art at night. In doing this, the workers defied the logic of time that trapped them in the factory. The characters in Ranciere’s book are diverse, such as, Jerome Gillard an ironsmith tired of hammering iron and Pierre Vicard a metal worker who aspired to be a painter. These workers sought to cross the barrier that separated labor from those who produced art. Ranciere’s project in Nights of Labor was to foreground the tensions between the ambitions of the worker intellectual and their construction as political subjects by history. He problematized the ideological separation between workers and intellectuals, and perceived unities of class identities, experiences, and political demands. The book offered a radical revision not just of working class history but also the relationship between politics, knowledge, aesthetics, and equality.
Ranciere’s intervention resonates with the experience of worker-filmmakers in Malegaon. The Malegaon filmmakers are powerloom workers who in their free time create films that circulate via video halls. Their urge to be creative within infrastructural constraints and the constraints of filmmaking skill was aptly captured by Shakeel Bharti who said,
We don’t have facilities but we are making films. That’s what’s special. We don’t have great voices, but we are singing. That is what is exceptional. We have no weapons, but we are fighting a war, and winning it.
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In their creative urge, we see the continuous struggle of filmmakers to partition time. The main source of income for most of the people involved in filmmaking in Malegaon is not through films but through their work in the powerlooms. As a result, the films are always running over schedule and constantly readjusted according to the availability of actors and technicians. Due to family issues or their work in the looms, it was common that actors and technicians were unable to turn up on schedule. Shafique who played the role of Crime Master Gogo in Malegaon’s version of Andaaz Apna Apna (Santoshi, 1994) and Malegaon ka Superman observed,
In Malegaon most people work in looms. Even people from good homes are compelled to do this. My father had said, “Don’t ever work in a loom,” but times are hard.
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Most businesses in Malegaon depend on power, yet for the past 7–8 years it was common for the town to experience power cuts that last somewhere between 8 and 10 hours. Farogh observes that
if power goes for 8–10 hours a day, what will a worker earn? From making Rs 1000 a week, he is now making Rs 400–600. You can’t feed a family with Rs 400.
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Hamid Bhai, one of the most respected actors of Malegaon, owns his own powerlooms but refuses to pursue acting as a full-time vocation.
I love acting but I have to also work here. I can’t leave both because acting is my passion and this job earns the bread and butter for my children. 23
Localizing Stardom
How does the question of stardom play out in this type of film culture? Richard Dyer’s (1979) seminal work on Hollywood stars, combined sociology and semiotics to dissect the star phenomenon. Dyer argued that the star was an intertextual construct produced across a range of media (such as, film, newspaper stories, and TV programs) and cultural practices, capable of intervening in particular films as well as demanding analysis of itself as a star text. The study of stars became an issue in the social production and circulation of meaning, linking industry, film, printed texts, and the social. Dyer also importantly noted that though stars were real people, the public did not know them directly but through various media texts. By contrast, the role of the star in Malegaon is intricately linked to the idea of community and the local film. Dwight Swanson (2010) in an essay on itinerant filmmaking observes that its interest for local audiences lay in producing the small town on screen. Itinerant filmmaking is a form of locally made small-town film production. It uses actors from the town, with whom directors usually spend many hours in the course of filmmaking. In these kinds of film, the attraction of the star for the audience, says Swanson, relies primarily on “seeing yourself, your community, your neighbor onscreen.”
In Malegaon, the discourse on stardom is centered on people’s fascination with their local boys embodying the roles of the famous Bombay cinema counterparts. This fascination also ensures repeat audiences for the film. Actors carefully study the mannerisms, style, gestures, and voices of the original star actors. The star in Malegaon is a look-alike, with an economy sprouting up to make sure that the right look is achieved through haircuts and clothes. Hence, a Salman Khan look-alike can function as a Sunny Deol double in the same frame, or an Ajay Devgan look-alike can be cast in the role of Aamir Khan for “Lagaan.”
“When I was a kid, the first film that my brother showed me was an Amitabh Bachchan film. I didn’t know who TV or who Amitabh Bachchan was,” says Shafique, “but after I watched the film, I styled my hair like him, behave like him, walk like him, talk like him, hey, all that” (sic). 24
The actors also enjoy a tremendous amount of respect from the local community. Akram, who owns his own photography studio, points out that by acting in local films he has reaped benefits, as he says, “a number of marriage proposals have come my way. People give me a lot of respect.” 25 Farogh’s mother expresses her happiness at the increase in social stature and respect for her family due to her son’s screenwriting skills, pointing out that people now want to meet and congratulate her. In Malegaon, one gets fame and respect for being a star. Acting in a film also attracts funding, as some people chip in either to cast themselves in small roles or in the case of Malegaon Ki Lagaan, a father funded the film entirely so his son could get a chance to appear onscreen. However, there is a limit to what fame can give you. Shabana, Irfan Iliyas’ wife does not seem too thrilled about the fame her husband has garnered for himself, pointing out that “fame doesn’t help, it only makes one happy. But one needs money to live.” 26
But what about the female stars? The women actors are not recruited from the town but hail from nearby places, such as, Bombay, Nagpur, and Dhulia. These women are professional dancers and are paid ₹ 1,000 per day. As these women do not belong to the local milieu, they constitute the most expensive part of the budget. The women of Malegaon are an absent presence, they do not act in films, nor do they watch the films. They only function as bystanders during shoots. Hamid Bhai asserts that men do the work and earn money for the family while it is the job of the women to sit at home, which he deems to be “no greater job for a woman.”
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Farogh Jafri states that poverty prevents townspeople from completing their education and developing their thinking. It is a “vicious cycle.”
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But what do these actresses think about their own role in the industry? For Akanksha, it is a “paid picnic,” where one is treated with respect, food, care, and recognition. Nitin Sukhija cites the example of Vrushali, a dancing girl of Indore who likes acting in the films of Malegaon because while she is not treated with respect as a professional dancer, in Malegaon she is paid decent money and is a star. As she herself states,
there is a rush to see us, people shout “heroine aayi” (the heroine has arrived), coming here all eyes are fixed on us, there is job satisfaction.
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Trupti, the heroine of Malegaon ka Superman, comes with all the baggage of a star, throwing tantrums about her makeup, smiling winningly at bystanders, and accepting the roses given to her by fans. Commenting on Malegaon film industry’s relationship with women Trupti remarks,
the people here don’t let women act. I mean depending on the family. How the family is. I have noticed that women here don’t live frankly (sic).
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Maliwood came into being through the townspeople’s love for cinema and their negotiation with prevailing socioeconomic conditions. The stage plays and the marriage video business laid the foundation for a technical infrastructure while their use of innovative techniques and the employment of actresses from outside the town made this local cinema viable. When the director of Lagaan, Ashutosh Gowariker, saw the Maliwood films he could barely conceal his surprise. He was taken aback at methods filmmakers had come up with to record sound as cleanly as possible, and how they used in camera and video home system (VHS) editing skills—a technique Gowariker himself had used to make his own student 10-minute film:
This is the first time we are seeing an alternative to Hindi cinema in the Hindi language itself, from a town which is in Maharashtra, I am finding that most surprising and astonishing.
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The Curious Case of the “Break” in Maliwood
By 2006, Maliwood was thriving. It had also ventured into making its own original feature films, such as, Farogh Jafri’s Dhamaal, which had elements of comedy interspersed with a message-driven content, in this specific case that of peace. Akram wrote, directed, and starred in Munna, the story of a young boy attracted to and eventually trapped in a world of crime. Thematically and stylistically, Akram claimed to be influenced by films, such as, Satya (Varma, 1998) and Vaastav (Manjerakar, 1999). 32
However, in 2006, the bomb blasts also took place. Terror attacks and communalism once again put Malegaon at the forefront of national news. This led to a strict government crackdown in the town. Many video halls did not have proper licenses, nor did they qualify for acquiring a proper theater license. As a result, many video halls were shut down, restricting opportunities for film exhibition. Halls were converted into shops or restaurants. Nasir himself closed down the parlor and converted it into a readymade garment shop. This apparently led to the “death of the unique spoof industry” (Joshi, 2009) of Malegaon. This is the most popular and widely circulating account of the so-called decline in the mainstream press.
Akram and Irfan Iliyas contest this version. First, they insist that films continued to be made despite the closing down of video halls. What did affect them was Nasir closing his own hall as its central location attracted a large number of people. Nasir was compelled to close the hall because his family wanted him to make more money by converting it into a garments shop.
Second, in the account given by Akram, Irfan, and Nitin Sukhija, distributors were becoming wary of buying Maliwood films as these films were spoofing Hindi films and might be hauled up for copyright infringement. However, they offer no substantiation of this point and in fact Lawrence Liang observes that copyright has never been an issue for the films of Malegaon. However, he also notes that there is often a distinction between the popular perception of the threat of copyright infringement and the actual legal threat it poses. Copyright in film is only violated if there is direct reproduction of the film or a violation of agreements regarding commercial exploitation in distribution, exhibition, and video rental. The reproduction of substantive themes of a film in a remake is not a violation of film copyright but it could be a violation of a literary work, such as, a screenplay. As the spoof remakes of Malegaon are substantive transformations, they do not violate intellectual property. Liang notes that even if a copyright case were filed against the Malegaon films, they would be saved by the parody defense of Section 52 of the Copyright Act. We may provisionally conclude that though there was no evidence of direct policing of the Malegaon industry the rumors and hearsay that circulated regarding piracy indicate a pervasive sense of the precarious conditions under which these films were made. 33
Nitin Sukhija provides another account, that a feud between two filmmaking groups led to a decline in film production. One was led by Nasir and the other by Salim, while Akram chose not to get involved. As a result, there was a breaking up of creative teams, films started bombing and a lot of investors suffered losses. It was this that led Nasir to close his video hall and open a readymade garment shop. Sukhija claims it was only with Faiza Khan’s arrival in Malegaon to make a TV documentary that they were goaded into making another film using newer technologies, and this gave a second lease of life to Maliwood. 34
The “Superwoman” of Malegaon
The daily newspaper DNA hailed Faiza Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon as the best film of 2012, with its in-house reviewer Aniruddha Guha referring to it as the “most stunning Indian film” (Guha, 2012) of the year. The film is praised for telling a great story in an engaging manner combining humor, emotion, and content. NDTV, in its review, called it the “funniest documentary of the year” (NDTV, 2012) and drew analogies with Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011). If Hugo was a feature film about one man’s passion for making special effects cinema, the reviewer pointed out that Supermen of Malegaon was a documentary version of the same kind of passion. The amount of coverage the press gave this film was unusual for a documentary film. Faiza Khan was an assistant director working in the Bombay film industry. Disillusioned with how the industry worked, she chanced upon a newspaper article about the Malegaon films and was struck by the fact that people there were making films for the love of it. Previously she had only known of Malegaon through news reports on bomb blasts, terrorism, and communal violence. She went to meet Nasir with a couple of DVDs and the idea that he might remake “Superman.” However, minutes into the meeting Nasir preempted her suggestion by declaring that one film he really wanted to make was Superman and proceeded to narrate his script. 35
Faiza Khan’s documentary is an engaging, warm, and a contemplative journey through Malegaon. It also functions as a tribute to the sprit that enables the “Supermen of Malegaon” to make Malegaon ka Superman. Faiza has described the making of the film as an observational process, of being a fly on the wall. 36 The impulse was to document the filmmaking process and the lives of the people behind the making of the film. They ended up shooting 250 hours of footage, which was later edited to a final cut of 52 minutes. As I will show later in this article, the film had an impact on the future of Maliwood as well as documentary filmmaking practices in India.
The women in Malegaon, says Faiza, are always in purdah and are not allowed inside video theaters to watch films. They can only go to the big theaters that showcase Hindi films accompanied by their families. When Faiza first met the people from the Malegaon industry, she was accompanied by a team of six, of which she was the lone woman. They automatically assumed that one of the men was the director and were surprised to find out that it was her. Faiza admits that in Malegaon her gender, religious outlook, and urban upbringing posed a challenge, as it was so different from the norm for women. For instance, she was not allowed to shoot inside the video parlor and two men from her team had to be deputed. However, as a filmmaker she got access to the families living in Malegaon and an opportunity to interact with them. 37 Faiza says this enabled her to grasp the social nuances of the town. Such empathy gives her film a vitality that avoids the sense of distanced urban gaze characteristic of subsequent documentaries on Malegaon. Made over seven months in 2008 during the shooting of Malegaon ka Superman, the documentary captures the community endeavor involved in making the film. It also shows the novel methods used to cross technical hurdles, such as, the use of bullock carts and bicycles.
Faiza Khan’s documentary only brought publicity and national awareness to a marginal film economy. From this time, we also observe changes taking places in Maliwood, particularly the technology and scale of production. Prior to 2008, films were made using VHS technology. In 2008, with the making of Malegaon ka Superman a shift occurred in the technological apparatus and the film budget. If earlier films were made on a budget of ₹ 40,000–50,000, Malegaon ka Superman cost ₹ 2 lakhs. Nasir observes that times were changing and computers were being used everywhere. For the first time, he used chroma-key 38 to make Superman fly, as it was this ability that audiences found most appealing. Akram has also invested in new technology. He owns his own PC desktop, which has two mikes attached to it. He regularly downloads new software and keeps on practicing them to become efficient. He claims to be competent at handling software, such as, Adobe Premier Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Combustion. Faiza points out that in terms of the scale of production, Nasir’s films are bigger than the average Malegaon film as he makes it a point to get everybody involved. Nasir also maintains clear departments for his films. Therefore, there will be a scriptwriting team, an edit team, a shooting team, a costume, and makeup team. However, for the average Malegaon film, there is no demarcation of teams and one person is involved in multiple roles in the filmmaking process. 39
The shooting of Faiza’s documentary also invigorated the filmmaking scene in Malegaon. As Nasir’s film operated on a bigger budget, it brought into its ambit most of the people involved in filmmaking in Malegaon. At this point, we can see the complex flows that are taking place—“Superman” being adapted as a local film, the local filmmaking culture inspiring the making of a documentary that would circulate internationally, the documentary crew, many of whom had ties with Bombay, providing an interface between local and “Bollywood” practices.
The Commercial, Cultural, and Social Life of Supermen of Malegaon
Supermen of Malegaon took off when it won the Asia Pitch organized by Mediacorp in Singapore, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) in Japan, and Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) in South Korea. The film was amongst the final three films that were selected. The plan was to showcase the film on the Singapore TV channel but not to send it across to various film festivals. The film was spotted by a French film critic who passed the film to a festival in Italy where the film won an award. Thereafter it travelled to various film festivals and became popular. Till date, the documentary has traveled to 30 film festivals and won 15 awards. Commenting on its success in the festival circuit, Faiza notes, “Supermen of Malegaon is very universal in its appeal. It’s a story of the underdog fighting and striving against all odds coming his way.” 40 The film also boasts of a talented crew that is associated with Hindi nonmainstream cinema. The music was composed by Sneha Khanwalkar and Hitesh Sonik, who have also been part of projects, such as, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (Banerjee, 2008), Omkara (Bhardwaj, 2006), Gangs of Wasseypur (Kashyap, 2012), and Kaminey (Bhardwaj, 2009). The editor Shweta Venkat has edited Gangs of Wasseypur and That Girl in Yellow Boots (Kashyap, 2010). The coproducer and cinematographer Gargey Trivedi shot My Friend Pinto (Dar, 2011) and Niraj the sound designer has done work on films, such as, Valu (The Wild Bull, Kulkarni, 2008).
The film was picked up by PVR Director’s Rare for a theatrical release. PVR Director’s Rare is an alternative programming initiative showcasing “undiscovered cinematic gems every week.” 41 The banner also works as a springboard for theatrical exhibition of Indian independent cinema and niche content. They also showcase Hollywood classics, such as, Casablanca (Cutiz, 1942), The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), rerelease classics, such as, Jaane Bhi do Yaron (Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, Friends, Shah, 1983), and Chasme Badoor (Begone, evil eye, Paranjpye, 1981) and exhibit “indie” films, such as, I am Kalam (Panda, 2010), Good Night, Good Morning (Kamath, 2010), and Love Wrinkle Free (Mohan, 2011). 42 They selected Supermen of Malegaon for screening as it “celebrates the spirit of filmmaking,” the hook they thought would connect with the majority of their “target audience.” 43 The Malegaon films for them represented independent filmmaking in its purest form, that is “maximum utilization within minimum resources” 44 while being done in a funny, spoof kind of way. 45
A copy of the film was acquired in March 2012 and was released across 12 cities in India including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Kolkata. It is the most successful film released by PVR Director’s Rare as it had a theatrical run of 3 weeks and recovered all its costs. 46 They also credit the film’s publicist for the public relations (PR) strategy for the film as she managed to create tremendous word of mouth for the film primarily through the use of social media. Junglee Home Videos, part of the Times Group, acquired the film for its DVD release. The success of the Superman of Malegaon has had an impact not only on Malegaon but on documentary filmmaking in India as well.
Malegaon Ka Mania
The success of Supermen of Malegaon has impacted documentary filmmaking in India in two ways—appropriating the documentary as “indie”
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which is intrinsically tied to exhibition opportunities and secondly, in terms of the subject matter. Bill Nichol’s (1991) has argued that within the stylistic diversity of films commonly categorized as nonfiction, documentary has been notoriously difficult to define. In seeking to be inclusive, most definitions have inevitably been vague, clumsy, and prescriptive. As he (1991, p. 12) observes,
Documentary as a concept or practice occupies no fixed territory. It mobilizes no finite inventory of techniques, addresses no set number of issues, and adopts no completely known taxonomy of forms, styles, or modes.
Throughout our conversation, Shiladitya Bora, who currently heads the PVR Director’s Rare division, kept emphasizing the fact that Supermen of Malegaon is an indie and, at least in this instance, conflated the terms “indie” and “documentary.” But how does he define independent film? Shiladitya stressed the way this film was differentiated from the category of mainstream Bombay cinema films. The spectator of this kind of film implies a distinct niche market. The average price of a ticket for a PVR Director’s Rare film is ₹ 850, from which we can infer that they cater to a niche and select clientele that belong to a particular class. There is a possibility that this audience received Supermen of Malegaon in the vein of Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore, 1988), as a film about the magic of cinema, but perhaps it also speaks of the fascination of the sophisticated urban spectator watching a filmmaking practice unfolding in a small town.
However, not all documentaries would be assigned indie status or deemed to have such exhibition value. The success of Supermen of Malegaon provided a certain confidence that documentary could do well, but what sort of documentaries? I have not observed documentaries that are experimental in style or with a serious, intellectually demanding approach being selected, as exhibitors probably do not believe their audience would find them engaging enough to hold their interest. They are looking for films like Supermen of Malegaon that are light, humorous, and yet have an identifiable subject matter for the Indian audience. 48
The success of Superman has also led to the trend of “copycat” documentaries that focus on small towns and their local film productions. There is Mamta Murthy’s Fried fish, Chicken Soup, and a Premier Show (2012) about the local digital industry of Manipur and an upcoming documentary on filmmaking in Meerut. The film has also made Malegaon a popular subject matter for documentary filmmakers.
Due to the success of the documentary around various film festivals across the country and the world, the Malegaon film industry started gaining recognition and appreciation. When the documentary was shown at a festival in Goa, international buyers jostled to snap up the rights. Nasir recalls that in Delhi a roomful of 2,000 students demanded that the show be repeated at least four times. He also cites the British filmmaker Paul Martin as being astonished by his low-budget filmmaking and how Martin went on to make a documentary on the flourishing filmmaking scene in Malegaon. Rishi Kapoor congratulated him at the Osian Film Festival and Anurag Kashyap declared himself a fan (Ganesan-Ram, 2010).
Supermen of Malegaon also led to opportunities for Maliwood people to work for the mainstream film and television industry. Nasir got an opportunity to direct a 26-episode TV series commissioned by Sab TV. The show was a silent comedy along the lines of Mr. Bean 49 and was entitled Malegaon Ka Chintu. The main cast and crew comprised people of Malegaon and was shot in Malegaon. It aired from 2010 to 2011. The second season was shot in places, such as, Ahmedabad and Thailand. 50 This season was entitled Chintu Ban Gaya Gentleman with Sab TV promoting the premise of exotic locations of Chintu’s travels with his girlfriend. In their study of the early local film of the United Kingdom, Toulmin and Loiperdinger (2005) observe that the genre of the local film in early cinema evolved when exhibited outside its locality. In the case of Malegaon, the local film has evolved into a TV show with polished production values and the employment of silent comedy as a narrative device. Since the audience of the TV show constitutes a pan Indian audience, the specific local context was discarded in favor of broader tropes, such as, Chintu’s pursuit of his beautiful girlfriend, his adventures in India and abroad and his small-town origin and mentality. In the TV show, the small town evolves from a place where the townspeople of Malegaon derive pleasure because of the recognition factor to a depiction of a small town that is informed through the mainstream (primarily urban) perception of it.
The fascination exercised by this remote and innovative low-tech film culture saw Malegaon getting the attention of documentary filmmakers from abroad and India. A five-member team from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was sent over to Malegaon as part of their project “India Reborn” (Faizee, 2008). The team headed by Jacqueline Corkery explained that they focused Malegaon as it had developed without any active support from the government, and despite
Hours of power disruptions, more than hundred years of power looms, poor weavers laboring hard for a miserable amount and still very humorous and jolly, caring damn about anything. It’s all very fascinating. (ibid.)
Speaking specifically on the filmmaking practice, she stated that
Despite lack of technological savoir faire, the way these youngsters have produced so many films is really surprising. Though remakes, the end results of their films are really astonishing. (ibid.)
There have been a glut of documentaries in India on Malegaon. At the time of writing, the number of released and in production films on Malegaon stand at seven, with five following on the heels of the success of Faiza Khan’s documentary. Two of them are foreign productions. The Indian documentaries Maliwood Talks and Malegaon Times follow the template of picking up a local actor or director and through their character exploring the filmmaking and sociopolitical context of Malegaon. Maliwod Talks follows the making of Malegaon ki Ghajini with Shakeel Bharti, its filmmaker, as the main character. The film’s self-description uses words, such as, “inspiring,” “hardship” and “sacrifice.”
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Malegaon Times deals with the “idea of performance amongst the working class, powerloom town of Malegaon” through the figure of Asif Albela. Aesthetically, the film keeps emphasizing the connection between the powerloom and the film reel and uses the last sequence of Modern Times (1936) to make an analogy between the film classic and present-day Malegaon. Throughout a process of “othering” is observable, with Malegaon being painted as an impoverished town trying to deal with modernity and obsolete technology. What I want to emphasize here is that the documentaries following Faiza Khan’s are capitalizing on the underdog story of Malegaon without dealing with the social complexities and dynamics of the place, including the way filmmaking has been reconstituted in the locality as a result of the emergence of new technologies, documentary representation and circulation, and local filmmaker’s mobilization into television and a national audience. These documentaries’ self description, aesthetic and narrative style, use of subject matter, and audience reaction gives us clues that they have been made specifically for an urban audience. In his article “This Thing Called Bollywood,” Madhava Prasad (2003) observes that the discovery of Hindi cinema by foreign filmmakers, such as, Baz Luhrmann who used Hindi songs for his film Moulin Rouge (2001) has led to a
reification of its most obvious distinguishing properties (such as melodrama in the deployment of narrative structure, song and dance sequences) as constituting its permanent identity.
Perhaps such fetishism is relevant to Malegaon as well, where documentary filmmakers tend to fix its social, industrial and aesthetic forms.
In a recent development, Nasir has sold the rights of Malegaon ka Superman to the Bohra Brothers, with Anurag Kashyap acquiring presentation rights for the film. 52 The film is yet to be released. This made the theatrical launch of Supermen of Malegaon unique as the first time a film about the making of a film was released before the actual film. Nasir has also sold his life rights to Zoya Akhtar who has tentative plans to make a documentary on him in the future (Filmy Friday, 2011).
In a conversation about Zoya and Anurag’s role, Faiza termed it as “naiveté” 53 on Nasir’s part while Nitin Sukhija and Shiladitya speculated that Zoya must have bought the rights for ₹ 2–3 lakhs. They suggested that Nasir’s story besides being inspirational was also perfect for bringing to life on the screen in either fiction or nonfiction form. Both also said that if Zoya had not bought the rights, they would have. Both Nitin and Shiladitya emphasize that the Maliwood people are recognized for what they do in Malegaon as it is unique. They should not aspire to make it big in Mumbai as it is a different filmmaking space. 54
These new developments have also made it difficult to access my field and affected my own methodological approach. Nasir the “buniyadi admi” (the man who laid the foundation) 55 of Malegaon was in the beginning very helpful and cooperative, but within a few days he changed his stance and refused to speak to me saying he had sold his life rights. He also implied that others could not speak to me as well as he feared his life story would be appropriated or written by somebody else. As Malegaon Ka Chintu was under production at the time of writing, the shooting locales were shifting continuously from Ahmedabad to Thailand. I also found it difficult to gain access to the later films produced in Malegaon. As the Bohra Brothers have bought the rights of some of the notable films, they are now not available in the market.
People involved in the filmmaking scene of Malegaon demonstrate a remarkable self-awareness. Both Akram and Irfan, neither allied to any camp, point out it is the documentary filmmakers who have primarily reaped the benefits from the Malegaon experience. Exposure has not changed local economic circumstances substantially, nor has it changed the scale of opportunities given to local filmmakers by the Mumbai film industry. Moreover, it has succeeded in typecasting them as “jugadoo filmmakers.” 56 Akram recalls informing Aamir Khan that they had started making films on a budget of ₹ 12–13 lakhs, implying improved production standards. Aamir laughed and said, “Ab kya tum 3D film bana rahe ho?” (Are you making a 3D film?). 57 Akram and Irfan believe that for Maliwood to sustain itself, filmmakers must shift from spoof comedy films to “original” scripts and also make short films that would increase opportunities and alter perceptions about Malegaon films. Short film script-writing has proliferated, and the success of Irfan’s A Request (2012), featuring an all-child cast to address communal harmony, at the Short and Sweet festival in Delhi has encouraged this trend. It also highlights Maliwood’s exposure to the film festival circuit where short filmmaking is gaining prominence. In general, filmmakers are also alert to channels of circulation, uploading their films on YouTube to increase the audience reach of their productions.
Although the term industry is employed by the mainstream press, documentary filmmakers and filmmakers of Malegaon hesitate to use this term. Faiza Khan and Nitin Sukhija see it is an informally organized sector with no clear departmental division. Akram and Irfan emphasize innovative use of limited resources and how Maliwood for them is simply a step toward greater opportunities in either television or film in the Mumbai Industry. At the time of writing, Akram was in discussion with Ultra Video to commission a web comedy series. Maliwood then is home to an informally organized locally situated filmmaking practice.
Malegaon has been a popular subject for many documentary filmmakers. Mainstream Bombay cinema and international filmmakers have shown interest in Malegaon through the purchase of film rights or via production of films on the space. People from Malegaon have also had opportunities in the TV industry, though it is not stable as the recent focus of the town has been on the short film form due to their exposure to the film festival circuit. At this moment, it is difficult to state whether Malegaon will continue to function as an independent local filmmaking space or get co-opted by the mainstream. I do not therefore offer definitive answers but have tried to capture a moment of transformation.