Bollywood : Poster-ed In Time
The history of Indian cinema goes back 105 years to 1913, when Dadasaheb Phalke birthed the industry with a silent, 40 minute feature film, Raja Harishchandra. “A performance with 57000 photographs. A picture two miles long. All for only three annas” was Phalke's promotional line for Indian cinema's first film. However, when one takes a glance at its poster released in the prestigious “Times of India”, it is a disappointing far cry from the general layout of a film poster – it had no glossy pictures and thick fancy writing. Phalke would continue making films - all of them silent, after the elite audience he'd invited and the thousands who gathered to watch Raja Harishchandra at the Coronation Cinematograph said good things about his 57,000 pictures. However, the posters that accompanied would be as bland and full of writing as the first, at least until ten more years had passed.
In the 1920s, Bollywood cinema (a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood, dubbed by the media), saw the introduction of a new form of culture – poster painting. The use of hand painted Bollywood posters in film publicity gradually began to take shape. The oldest surviving hand painted movie poster in Indian cinema is of the 1924 Marathi movie, Kalyan Khajina. The alluring art of hand painted Bollywood posters has travelled a long way since then – from serving as the primary advertising medium in the golden era of Indian cinema to the present day, where it also serves as a subject of much curiosity for art lovers, vintage & antique collectors, Bollywood movie poster aficionados, art galleries, museums and commercial premise owners.
Hand painted Bollywood posters were designed with the sole purpose of grabbing eyeballs and they did precisely that. Loud, over-the-top, unnatural colours typified the kitschy, bohemian appearances of most vintage hand painted Bollywood posters. Another striking characteristic was the use of broad visible brush strokes and 3D styled typography, seen in most of them.
In its infancy, Bollywood cinema was behaviourally escapist. As British colonial rule crippled the subcontinent, sufficient laws were passed in London to keep the freedom of expression of filmmakers here in check. While romance began to capsize the interest of many filmmakers of the time, some dealt with more serious issues, making small, yet significant contributions to the freedom movement. Indian cinema found its voice with Alam-Ara (1931), its first talkie directed by Adreshar Irani, the founder of Imperial Films, one of the most successful film studios of the time.
In 1947, the British left the country, dividing it as they went. Almost simultaneously, Indian cinema entered into its golden age. In the period of 1940-1960, Bollywood grew. Studios popped up all throughout Mumbai and young artists flocked to them for jobs.
Some of these Indian posters took their inspiration from the imagery of Hollywood, but the former served a somewhat different purpose. As well as promoting the latest film in one of the most prominent film-producing countries in the world, the posters had also to respond to the audience’s unique cultural needs. In a nation as vast as India, with its inherent linguistic, religious and regional differences, Bollywood is a significant unifying thread. Thus, the film poster acted as a tool to cut across cultural barriers to make the film appeal to a mass market.
Historically, film posters have used language quite strategically. Text was kept to a minimum to accommodate the low levels of literacy when trying to appeal to a mass audience. Part of Bollywood’s appeal is its universal language, which traverses religious and regional boundaries to make films accessible to a broad multilingual audience. For instance, two of India’s major languages, Hindi and Urdu, are regarded as sister tongues, sharing a large common vocabulary. Bollywood films tend to use a colloquial blend of these, and increasingly a mix of Hindi, Urdu and English (known as Hinglish) which makes the films intelligible to speakers of several languages and dialects. It is for this reason that Bollywood is so popular among a wide British Asian audience; whether they’re Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, and regardless of mother tongue, the language of Bollywood brings them together.
While the language of Bollywood is intelligible to a broad audience when spoken, the unique writing systems for Urdu and Hindi make their scripts mutually exclusive. This is another reason to keep Bollywood posters so light on text; a quote or tagline in one script would exclude large parts of the audience, particularly in rural centres.
Conversely, the film’s title on the poster for the epic Mughal-e-Azam appears in three different scripts—Hindi, Urdu and English—to attract the largest audience possible.
The poster for Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) features the title in Hindi only, suggesting this particular version was created for a specific region. In the absence of a central publicity machine, local cinemas would hire an artist locally to paint their billboards, trusting them with a set of publicity stills, which were probably little more than stock shots of the film’s main stars. The artist would then re-imagine the film’s key themes, infusing the images with drama, romance, regional nuances and their own aesthetic sensibility. This also explains the existence of multiple versions of the same poster.
A second poster for DDLJ illustrates how posters are modified in accordance with a film’s post-release publicity strategy. The later poster replaces the original stylised image of the fun-loving couple with a simple photograph to emphasise the film’s central theme of romance. The image is taken from DDLJ’s most popular song, ‘Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jaana Sanam’, which was famously filmed in the mustard fields of Indian Punjab. The poster text here is critical, highlighting the film’s runaway success; DDLJ ran for a record-breaking 500 weeks in the same cinema in Mumbai!
The Indian star system also determines the nature of the film poster. With text usually diminished to the background, the star becomes the key focus. But then, a Bollywood star always has been the film’s main commodity and draw. Fans will choose a film based on the star it features. His or her name is not required on the poster; the star will be instantly recognisable anyway.
In the era of Bollywood film studios during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, artists were contracted to work on publicity posters. As specific studios developed their own distinctive styles of film making, the poster painters played a vital role in perpetrating the star’s persona—creating an iconic representation and simply carrying this persona from one film to the next. This was the case with Fearless Nadia, who went on to marry her director and owner of Wadia Movietone, the studio which made all her films. The English-Greek actress, born Mary Evans, was reinvented as Indian cinema’s original stunt queen. Posters for films like Bambaiwali (Homi Wadia, 1941), depict her repeatedly as a larger-than-life, weapon-wielding, ‘fearless’ huntress.
The film poster artists are also credited with creating one of Bollywood’s most iconic images, Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man. In order to imbue the image of Bachchan with anger, the artists created their own visual language by blending distinct art styles such as painting with knives instead of traditional brushes. The unusual technique and its powerful effect are clearly visible on the celebrated poster for Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1975), which is dominated by Bachchan’s enraged, darkened expression.
Following the demise of the studio system in the 1970s, independent workshops such as Jolly Art Studio, Kalarath and Om Studio were established to cater exclusively for the film industry. Between them, these workshops employed around 200 artists to paint their posters and banners. The employees were usually self-taught, learning their craft from senior artists before setting up on their own. Incidentally, one of India’s best known artists, M F Hussain, famously began his creative career as a painter of Bollywood film posters. In the absence of digital equipment, the finesse displayed by talented artists like Babu Lal and MF Hussain are credited with painting the next door heartthrob image of one of Bollywood's greatest stars, Rajesh Khanna, both onto the posters of his films and the hearts of his followers.
Film producers had their own priorities for poster design. They wanted the poster to act as a safety net. It had to offer value for money by appearing to be all things to all people. Thus, the movie had to appeal to as many different segments of society as possible by offering comedy, romance, action and melodrama all on one poster, as a promise of the different ingredients the film contained. And so, rather than highlighting the most compelling image to offer one strong key message, some producers preferred to consolidate every highlight from the film. This inevitably made the posters seem cluttered, as did showing the main character in different guises. Yet, the lure of variety was deemed to make it appeal to many different markets simultaneously.
Cut and paste techniques became dominant in the 1970s, when posters began to resemble montages. Images of actors were clipped from still photographs and pasted into a collage, cramming as much as possible into the available poster space, with a barely visible hand-painted background, ready to be reproduced in bulk. The posters from this era favoured pragmatism over creativity. The collage aimed to offer a glimpse of different aspects of the film, for instance the cast in a multi-starrer like Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) which features three heroes as well as three heroines.
Globally, of course, Satyajit Ray, who claimed to show what was unique in the Indian experience as well as what was universal in his motion pictures, became India’s ambassador to world cinema. Francois Truffaut is believed to have walked out of the Cannes screening of Pather Panchali because “it was about poverty and peasants.” Turned out that this story was fabricated. When Truffaut was in Mumbai in the 1970s, he clarified, “On the contrary, I wanted to see Pather Panchali once again, immediately after it ended.” Ray introduced his own uniqueness in poster making. Apart from Shatranj ke Khiladi, Ray did not attempt a Hindi film; he had the honesty to say that he could not work on a language he neither understood nor spoke. His posters had a very distinctive style. They were abstract, and broke away from the traditional usage of scenes from the film. He designed his posters for the large number of Bengali films he made, before impressed artists in Mumbai borrowed his creativity in their work.
Film posters in recent times, as well as the stars that appear on them, have become slicker and slicker. The poster as a key marketing tool has also given way to satellite television, where promotional budgets are now diverted. Meanwhile, it’s also worth remembering that Bollywood posters were originally created specifically for outdoor advertising. The posters complemented the oversized cinema hoardings at major road junctions. In a nation renowned for its vibrancy of colour, outdoor advertising by nature needed to be louder, more animated, eccentric and mesmerising to stand out from the crowd.
“The poster became the single visual snapshot to the film prior to its release. It is the only image of the film that the audience will carry with them when they go into the theatres. So, as you can understand, it was a very critical publicity medium”, says Himesh Jethwani, a film critic from the industry.
In the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Bollywood rapidly shed off its traditional painted posters and sought the aid of twenty first century editing tools. Newer posters were less cluttered and provided a more dignified look as well as a largely aesthetic appearance. Bollywood cinema was also undergoing a paradigm shift. Newer actors and actresses were rapidly shedding off Indian wear, which had dominated Indian screens, for a more western look. Apart from the increasing use of English in dialogues, new film posters are also advertised in a more Hollywood-like style. In fact, in the bulk of today's posters, Hindi words are written in English script, while, in replacement of the clutter of faces in the background of medieval Bollywood posters, a general image or scene from the film is put to display.
For many years, Bollywood has been more largely patriarchal. Back in the day, the general plot of a Bollywood film would almost certainly have these elements – the hero develops an interest towards the heroine, they fall in love yet face objection, either from a set of goons or from the girl's family. The hero spends a generous amount of time proving himself – by either fighting the goons or proving his worth to her family. Directors have always managed to put in exotic dance sequences in popularly aesthetic destinations, many of which are abroad. Till date, Bollywood fanatics have been known to travel to these foreign destinations frequently and extensively, much like a pilgrimage. In the end, the director rewards the audience by allowing the hero and heroine to come together finally, often in a tear-jerking scene, ensuring that they leave the theatre feeling contented and emotional.
For cinemas of this type, the posters have been representative. Often, they contain just the image of the two stars, providing the information with which cinema-goers decide whether to see the film or not. Names for these films are often explicitly romantic, which is another drawing factor for the romantic Indian cinema - goer.
Many have accused Bollywood of using female sexuality to promote films. A blogger for ‘Feminism in India’ writes about the Bollywood poster, “Bollywood has a notoriously large number of item numbers. But that’s not all. Poster after poster is made to draw attention to exposed parts of a woman’s body, even if its significance in the film is completely minute or absent. The 1950s featured women looking away wistfully in distant wonderment of the days to come, a helpless damsel in distress who played the role of a ‘tamed’ woman who helped the male protagonist. Bollywood has grown since. In today’s Bollywood, there are films which use scantily clad actresses on their posters to draw the attention of a major population, using their libido as a weakness.”
However, Bollywood hasn't been all about love. Some Bollywood films have spoken about more serious issues. The most recent example would lie in the courtroom thriller Pink (2016) starring Amitabh Bachchan, which spoke about the harassment of women in India. “Pink” was welcomed by the largely youthful diaspora due to two reasons – it was revolutionary, and it boasted the presence of one of Bollywood’s greatest stars. The film was so popular, that the then President of India, Sh. Pranab Mukherjee, requested for a special screening at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, India’s grand presidential residence. The film was also screened specially for the Rajasthan Police and was invited to be screened at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
“Pink” had a rather simple, yet integrated poster. From the title, it is conclusive that the film dealt with something relatively similar to womankind. Even the lettering for the word ‘pink’ was written in that colour. The backdrop was a grim, serious image of Amitabh Bachchan, donning the look of a legal officer. It also sported the portraits of the three prime female characters of the film, which furthered it's central theme. The poster for “Pink” has a very catchy appearance, the colour scheme is not only satisfying to the human eye, it also promises relief to the Indian cinema buff from the clutches of Bollywood’s obsession with love and romance.
Another example of a non-conventional Bollywood film would be “OMG - Oh My God”. For those living in the West, a film on religion and atheism is not something unheard of. However, for a country like India, where the fundamental principles of religion bind people together in their day to day functioning, such issues can be sensitive to the extent that they create religious unrest in the country. The film was successful, but it had its share of obstacles for dealing with sensitive issues – in May 2013, the High Court of Madhya Pradesh instructed the CBFCI (Central Board for Film Certification in India), or popularly the “Censor Board”, to take action against the producers for comments made against Hindu Gods. The film was also not screened in multiple locations in the country.
For the creative team of “OMG – Oh My God”, the poster was a difficult task. Praveen Bareria, who was in charge of the Visual Effects, records “…The theme of the movie was religious disbelief. We created a set of posters from which we shortlisted. The two prime actors – Paresh Rawal and Akshay Kumar had to be on the poster in the respective avatars of their roles in the film. Finally, we settled for a very inclusive poster, which was important for publicity.”
The film had a number of posters, based on different scenes, all set in a heavenly background. Unknown to the viewers of the poster, Akshay Kumar’s role in the movie was that of a Hindu deity in disguise; however his unconventional look on the poster atop a motorbike would never draw any guesses. To aid this, the creative team of OMG decided to insert the lettering – “A Divine Comedy” on all of its five posters. OMG amassed $28 million at the box office.
Quietly but steadily, Bollywood has used its popularity to spread messages throughout the country.
Bollywood posters are everywhere – one can spot them as bills on the dull brick walls of old buildings, or as flexes on the large, oversized billboards that line the streets of the country. They are present as small handbills on lamp posts and as sun packs hanging from a tree at a busy crossing. Behind the seemingly scattered appearance of the posters, there goes a lot of brainwork to locate a right spot to advertise. Advertising agencies take good advantage of the deficit of laws in the country to prevent sticking of bills at random places.
“As an advertiser, one must understand that the only way to successfully promote a brand is by grabbing public attention. Many movies have a dedicated advertising crew who recruit special agencies to ensure that a poster is put up at the right place”, says Anand Sharma, the Operations Head (East) of Kinetic, a popular advertising agency operating in seven major metros in the country.
The advertising agency has a simple, yet tedious task – to put the posters up at places where they would be visible to the public eye. The rest of course, depends upon the attractiveness of the posters. In the growing age of the internet, advertisements are often made online. Many film agencies are known to tie up with app developers to create specific advertisements for the purpose.
Since its inception in 1913, Bollywood has grown to be a fairly successful industry. A report by ‘Constative.com’ states, “Bollywood produces more movies and sells more than 4 billion movie tickets, almost twice that of Hollywood.”
The city of Mumbai houses some of the world’s most successful film studios, while simultaneously being witness to the birth and rise of the great Indian cinema. Through the past hundred years, Bollywood has blent into daily Indian life. Be it a popular song playing on the radio in a household hidden away in a corner of the country, or the common practice of using movie dialogues in daily conversation, the country has and continues to honour a tradition that is truly indigenous. For a nation that builds up 17% of the world’s population and has vast cultural differences over its landscape, this unifying thread can do wonders. It brings the country together as a national symbol. Bollywood has proved this time and again, especially when Indians living abroad flock to their local cinemas, with the intent of catching up with a newly released movie. When the soulful tune of a Bollywood song is heard, anyone can instantly recognise its uniqueness. Hundred years after Raja Harishchandra first screened, it is impossible in today’s India to experience Bollywood and not hum along the lines of the old Udit Narayan-Alka Yagnik duet “Mujhe pyaar ho gaya hai”(I have fallen in love).”
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Bibliography and Acknowledgments
I express my gratitude in particular to the British Council Library of Kolkata, the Science and Media Museum, London, United Kingdom and M.P. Goswami, research scholar at the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, Punjab University at Patiala. Additionally, the following sites have been accessed for the purpose of research:
The following books have been accessed for the purpose of gathering information relevant to the context of this article.
1. Bose, Mihir - Bollywood : A History, 2006
2. Pinto, Jerry – Bollywood Posters, 2008
3. Bouman, Edo; Duncan, Paul; Rajesh, Devraj – The Art of Bollywood, 2010
4. Chopra, Anupama – Sholay : The Making of A Classic, 2000
I express my sincere gratitude to all those who contributed to the overall presentation of this piece in it's final form.
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