Did you know that Shama Zaidi, who scripted Garam Hava and Mandi, introduced the master filmmaker Satyajit Ray to the concept of the colour palette in films? That Sooni Taraporevala, the writer of Salaam Bombay!, spent her student years at Havard working various jobs as a dishwasher, server, security guard...? That Juhi Chaturvedi, who wrote Piku, goes back to her childhood to give flesh and blood to her characters? Or that Sabrina Dhawan took two years to complete another script after Monsoon Wedding?
Scripting Bollywood is a first-of-its-kind volume that focuses on the life-world and writing practices of women screenwriters in Bollywood, an industry that is traditionally dominated by men. Through candid, insightful conversations, 14 women, who have penned everything: classics like Umrao Jaan and Rudaali; potboilers like Aaina and Dil To Pagal Hai, spy thrillers like Raazi; and spunky comedies like Vicky Donor, give their take on female writers and their relationship with the commercial Bollywood framework; women and the collaborative process of filmmaking; how their own realities give rise to memorable stories; and the liberating experience of writing for digital platforms.
Besides sharing their craft, the brilliant storytellers featured in this collection let readers into their lives and inspirations they are personal, powerful, real!
Anubha Yadav is an academic and writer based in Delhi. She has been teaching broadcast studies since 15 years at the University of Delhi. A member of the International Screenwriting Network, she has spent a decade researching in the area of screenwriting studies, and has published and presented papers in India and abroad. Yadav's short stories have won awards, and her writing has been published in several journals, magazines and news outlets, including the Huffington Post, Conversation, Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Indian Express and The Wire, among others. Her debut novel is The Anger of Saintly Men.
When Anubha Yadav mentioned to me that she was doing a book on women screenwriters of Hindi cinema, I greeted this information with delight. Having come across a couple of hack-job books on Indian screenwriting, I looked forward to a serious work on screenwriting and screenwriters.
Anubha has been teaching broadcast studies at Delhi University for more than 15 years and has done extensive research in screenwriting studies. I had seen her at several screenwriting conferences and seminars, steadily consolidating her interest in and knowledge about the subject. So, who better than her for such a work? And what better approach than to get screenwriters to speak about themselves and their work. About time, too!
In the history of Indian cinema, screenwriting has had the forlorn distinction of being a craft that has been least discussed-neither by the public, nor by the film industry-and almost never written about in any depth.
That ordinary viewers only recall the stars of the films they like, just about remember the director's name, and never register who the scriptwriter was, is hardly surprising. After all, where in the promos, posters or other publicity material of Indian films does one find a mention of the writer? The general belief is that it is the director who makes the film by getting the actors to perform and guiding the cameraman to capture the action. Unfortunately, barring a few exceptions, even film reviewers cannot seem to distinguish between the script and the direction while commenting on a film. So, most reviews just attribute everything to the director.
The idea of this book came almost a decade back when I was writing an academic essay on the work of scriptwriter-director Honey Irani for a presentation at the University of Copenhagen. Despite Irani's impressive repertoire of screenplays in mainstream Hindi cinema, there was little scholarly attention on her contribution to the Bombay film industry. I landed in Mumbai to interview Irani, which is when this project of documenting the life and work of women screenwriters in Hindi cinema started taking shape. I initially shot her interview on camera, as I was toying with the idea of making a documentary film. I remember how elated Irani had been to see a woman cameraperson shooting the interview. However, considering the length and depth of the conversations I ended up having with the women who are a part of this volume, I decided to present their voices and words in a book that gives readers a ringside view of their life-world and a better understanding of their craft.
As I got deeper into researching women screenwriters of Hindi cinema, I noticed the almost total absence of any exhaustive work on them. While there is a general invisibilising of screenwriters in film production cultures, where audiences mostly remember actors or directors associated with a film, the invisibilising of women screenwriters is more acute. Even stalwarts like Ismat Chughtai, Sai Paranjpye and Shama Zaidi have not been given due attention. There are, at best, scattered interviews and articles and maybe a few lines in a film encyclopaedia marking their presence and mentioning their films. 1 gradually started collecting these sketches and articles in a linear chronological order, working my way from films in pre-independence India till the end of the 20th century. 1 wanted to mark the women pioneers of screenwriting in order to give readers a context and background into the history and the contribution of women screenwriters, who were almost always multitasking as producers, directors, actors, and singers for their films.
The opening chapter of this book offers a brief glimpse into the life and cinematic stories of Fatma Begum, Jaddan Bai, Protima Dasgupta and Ismat Chughtai, from early silent films to the talkies, through short biographical profiles. I do hope these will not only introduce their unique personalities to the readers but will also pique their interest in these early film women and their role in shaping the world of Bombay cinema. This chapter describes the themes and subjects they focused on and the manner in which these resonated with their lives, their struggles, and the times they lived in. Since nearly all the early films and scripts in India are lost and there are no archives available, I have gathered material from film magazines (notably Filmindia), song booklets, brochures, and other online resources.
The 14 interviews that follow detail five decades of screenwriting in Hindi cinema, from the 1970s till date Consequently, they also document the changes in our society and in the film industry, and how these have influenced a change (if any) in the themes, the writing practices, as well as the working conditions of the women storytellers.
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