Since ironic self-reflexivity has come home to Bollywood through films like Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Om Shanti Om and Tashan, movie goers might be forgiven for coming out of Ghajini asking themselves, ‘... and we were supposed to take this seriously?’ It seems like earnest masala, of the kind that made its mark in post-Nehruvian Hindi cinema and achieved its pinnacle in the action films of the ’80s, in a language that Bollywood fans are forgetting how to understand. Violence has never been absent from our screens – after all, running parallel to the rise of NRI-friendly family dramas through the ’90s were Ram Gopal Varma’s taut, grim thrillers that tried to explore urban underbellies and gang culture – but the revenge dramas and drooling, megalomaniac villains seem now to be surplus to cultural requirements, much like the revenge tragedies of the Elizabethans must have seemed to their more urbane successors.

As Baradwaj Rangan, film critic for The New Indian Express, noted in his review of the Tamil-language Ghajini, ‘You know the [Tamil masala] movie has worked when the inevitable good-guy-bad-guy fistathon happens and you’re baying for the bad guy’s blood. You’ve been appalled by all the bad things that have happened to the good guy [...] and you don’t want the bad guy to merely die, you want him to die after being ground to pulp, bloody pulp.’ This presupposes both an unassailable hero and an unforgivable villain, and this sort of folksy uber-male characterisation persists in the popular cinema of south India, particularly in the Tamil and Telugu film industries, in a way that they don’t in Bollywood’s multiplex fare. Observers will point to the differences in industry dynamics, particularly the predominance of the cult of the male actor down south that result in temples and ministerial positions being sanctified in their names. This may be a credible point of departure; although Bollywood has never shied from writing scripts for stars rather than actors, and the last decade has seen the solid stabilisation of the clout of Hindi cinema’s male superstars, the Mumbai film industry is in itself one of several power lodes of mass culture in the city, overlapping but still discrete from the circles of politics, corporate life, sport, and so on.

In the Tamil and, increasingly, the Malayalam film industries, this sort of fare forms a counterpoint to the apex of the triangle, a small (and diminishing) but influential production of serious cinema, which has a tradition in south India at least as strong as the parallel cinema movement of West Bengal. Naturally, realistic cinema need not be free from violence – if anything, last year’s Tamil sleeper hit, Subramaniapuram, set in 1980s Madurai, provided a stellar example to the contrary.

But an action film is not just a formalistic exercise, either. It marries the sensual effects of gore to sentiment and humanism – this is what distinguishes real masala, after all, from the ironic, self-distancing gore of, say, the Kill Bill films. Perhaps Bollywood has sublimated some of its more disturbing impulses, by turning to stories that reflect the aspirations of society, replete with wedding videos and genteel paeans to the power of wealthy families and benevolent social systems. The tensions of our stories, once about individuals finding extreme solutions to collective problems in the wake of institutional failures, have taken recourse in compromise and negotiation. Which is accurately reflective of how sensibilities have begun to diverge, if not change entirely. When no one is bad enough to beat into a pulp, then, no one is good enough to do it, anyway.

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