Sentimental Symptoms: The Films of Karan Johar and Bombay Cinema

Abstract

Indian film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha had once famously and perhaps apocryphally quipped that all Indian films may be divided into two categories – Bombay cinema and Satyajit Ray – the former a cinema for the masses, the latter an art cinema of limited commercial appeal of which Satyajit Ray was the great exemplar. More recently, this mass-class/commercial-art binary is being re-written by the popular press, and by fans and bloggers as ‘hat-ke’ versus ‘KJo.’ ‘Hat-ke’ literally means ‘off-center’ and ‘KJo’ is short for the Bollywood Director Karan Johar. These terms name divergent tendencies in Hindi cinema in the last decade and as such can shed light on the disintegration of film form and the segmentation of movie publics currently ongoing in the film industry. ‘Hat-ke’ refers to a growing body of films that are made on smaller budgets by new production corporations like Adlabs, Pritish Nandy Communications and UTVfilms. They feature lesser-known stars and match formal innovation with utterly contemporary – often risky – subject matter. The ‘hat-ke’ film usually plays well in the multiplexes in India's many urban centers and is favored by a younger, cosmopolitan spectator. Though more commercially oriented than art cinema, ‘hat-ke’ films share the vision of the art film movement that attempted to capture reality more authentically by creating an alternative to the mass product emanating from the industry in Bombay. In other words, they bear a morphologic affinity with what Rajadhyaksha calls the ‘Ray’ film.