Film: Kala Bazaar (Black Market)
Scene: Raghu sitting and sipping chai from a saucer.
Close-Up: Raghu.
Man 1 (off-screen): “You’ll die a dog’s death if you don’t have money in Bombay.”
Man 2 (off-screen): “What happened, Raghu?”
Raghu: “I don’t have a job.”

Voices whisper ‘money, money, money Raghu money’ in a gloomy, angry chorus as Raghu walks around Bombay, in search of the perfect job. Obsessed with earning lots of money, fast, he explores means to speed his way to wealth and respect in the city. Kicked out of a bus conductor’s job for answering back to a rude passenger and beaten up by a crowd, he is consumed by the need to be rich despite his illiteracy. Raghu first steals the money he needs to invest in buying black tickets and then sells them off for an astounding profit at the premiere of Mother India at Liberty cinema hall in Bombay.

My conversation with Dev Anand who played Raghu in the film revealed the complicated relationship between cinema and the city. Anand mentioned how the particular sequence in the film at the cinema hall, where Raghu organises a gang of boys to sell black tickets, was actually a live recording of Mother India’s premiere at Liberty. “Cameras were put all around the red carpet entrance to the event and the stars walking down that night were told that Dev Anand was acting as a black ticket seller in a film which was being shot as they walked down. Vijay Anand wanted to keep the sequence as close to reality as possible.” In a reflective rendition of cinema’s own powers of seduction, the quiet queues disrupt into a jostling crowd when stars sashay towards the cinema hall. Stakes are raised for the black tickets of the premiere show of Mother India…and Raghu earns a pot of money, kissing a rupee note in a dramatic crescendo to the end of the sequence.

An entire generation of cinema goers was familiar with the black marketeer amongst them, lingering outside a theatre hall. The black ticket man was ubiquitous, ‘a created function’. He signalled a disruption in the institutional practice of film circulation to accommodate the migrants, the homeless and the poor in the city. Habits of buying and selling tickets formed around him. Practices emerged as he partook in the processes of film exhibition and viewership in India. Cinema itself was left alone to fend for itself in the urban jungle, since the state was wary of supporting cinema in India (until as recently as the 1990s, when Sushma Swaraj gave cinema industry status) despite being the most popular mass medium of the 20th century. The film fraternity had to obtain finance from a range of sources. Black money funded a large number of film projects in Bombay, since the state was disinterested.

Kala Bazaar is the story of a black marketeer’s road to redemption in Nehruvian India. The film becomes a site around which various narratives and practices coalesce. (Watching a Rs 66 VCD of Vijay Anand’s Kala Bazaar is an example of cinema’s ability to tickle dormant spectator memories and make one ponder on the absence of the familiar stranger – the black marketeer. Truly then, as Ranjani Mazumdar states, Bombay cinema is an archive of the city. An archive of texts, sounds, spaces, people and legends.)

Raghu’s dramatic rise from penniless street walker to upper middle-class respectability as head honcho of a gang of black marketeers reveals the potential power of black circuits of circulation in the city of Bombay in the decades between 1960-1990. As recently as 2000, we find newspaper articles tracking the rise of gangsters like Chhota Rajan from petty black marketeer to one of the most powerful heads of an organised crime syndicate in South Asia.

While in Bombay black marketeer-ing became a stepping stone for entering the organised crime circuit, things were quite different in Delhi. In research scholar Aarti Sethi’s work on the figure of the black marketeer in 1950s Delhi, Aarti has commented on how local gangs were attached mainly to local neighbourhood halls. The ‘dada’ controlled the prices and the flow of traffic at the hall. The black ticket business in Bombay had wider and far more organised circuits of transactions built around the figure of the black marketeer. The local gangs might have controlled cinema exhibition sales in their areas in Bombay, but they in turn were answerable to the connected syndicate in the city. Dinesh, erstwhile black marketeer in Bombay, told me that tickets were sold at shops at Chor Bazaar, Bhindi Bazaar, Crawford Market and Buleshwar, never at the talkies. “We used to take tickets from the cinema hall. If not the hall, we would take them from the distributor. There were several groups operating around theatres. But we had tickets for all the theatres from town to Bandra available with us.”

A wise old multiplex manager who has been in the film exhibition business since the time of thriving single screen halls remembered how all the tickets of virtually every cinema hall in Bombay used to be available in black at Kalbadevi about 20 odd years ago. Usually, the space outside the ticketing window at the hall, near which a paan/chaiwala set up shop, next to which existed a cycle stand used to be the adda for black ticketing. “Cyclists parking their cycles were immediately told of the status of tickets at the box office,” Dinesh said. Thus, black tickets became part and parcel of the spatial movie ticket economy in India as well.

By the 1990s, the waning lives of single screen theatres in India affected by the video and cable boom hit all those associated with the business of film, black and otherwise. The black marketeer became the tapori of Rangeela. He was now a jobless man utilising a highly performative and gestural economy to survive in the city. However, the multiplex revolution in India swiftly erased this now powerless urban type from the landscape of film exhibition.

“Black marketeering of tickets has been wiped out by the multiplex,” says Girish Wankhede at Cinemax. Enumerating several reasons for this, he surmises that since multiplex tickets are very expensive, black ticket selling no longer remains a lucrative profession. “Blacking on a ticket with a box office price of Rs 150 needs a Ghajini today,” he says. Earlier, 28 shows of a film could be screened in an entire week in single screen halls, accommodated in 12-3-6-9 show timings. “With the multiplex, one can now screen 28 shows of a film in a day.” Since the multiplex shows a number of films at any given point, there are several options available simultaneously, in the event of full occupancy in one screen. At worst, one has to wait for half an hour for the next film, since show timings are now flexible. Most multiplexes are also attached to malls. A glide up and down the elevators is an extra shot of ‘cruising leisure’, as one moves back to the screen when the film begins. Significantly, the lit up, clean lines of the architectural edifice of the multiplex exteriors and its private security guards make it virtually impossible for a man to be able to carry out illegal transactions just outside the hall. Mere survival in the city through the money now earned by black marketeering cannot be guaranteed.

But once, this was a full time profession, and entire families lived on this income. Dinesh gives a real face to the death of the profession. It was a full time occupation for him, every night-show of the week and a day-long Sunday were his working hours. “Now Sunday is a holiday,” he says, cheekily.

The black marketeer may still be around, but most have shed their skins to take on other professions. In his new avatar, he may now be a DVD/VCD film pirate. Or a ballpoint pen seller. Perhaps coming generations will never know that there once existed a man who would earn his living by re-selling tickets for a movie; that he was created out of simultaneous and different needs, desires, excess and inaccessibility. And that in Bombay, he sometimes grew powerful enough to become a black lord, feared and ingrained in public memory, such that his story sparked the cinematic imagination of the city in films like Satya, Company and D. The romance of cinema was kept alive by the enigmatic city. Whither the cinema of the contemporary?

Nupur Jain is associated with Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. She is currently writing a biography of the multiplex in India.

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