"taste, taboo, trash: the story of the ramsay brothers"

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2012 3: 123BioScope: South Asian Screen StudiesKartik Nair

Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers

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Leadership Insights from Jaina text Saman Suttam 123

Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers

Kartik Nair

Abstract

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers forged a career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry, creating a niche market for their cheaply produced horror films. Despite draw-ing committed audiences in B- and C-centers, these films were dismissed by the urban English press as clumsy counterfeit versions of American and British products, and by the late 1990s a new school of practitioners led by Ram Gopal Varma had begun producing slick and songless horror films that could translate internationally. Little is known of the Ramsays’ production and distribution practices, their frugal discipline, their internal star system, and their markets in India’s rural territories. Using first-hand interviews and trade journals, this paper excavates the history of a cottage industry of terror that rode the same wave as Bombay’s blockbusters. It is perhaps perversely appropriate that the Ramsay Brothers rose to promi-nence in the 1970s, a time when the question of cinema—its politics, aesthetics, and status as “bad object”—returned to the fore in Bombay. Using essays and reviews from popular film magazines (espe-cially Filmfare), as well as censorship documents from the CBFC archives, this paper navigates the discursive life of the Ramsay Brothers as a way to illuminate the fault-lines of taste over which cinema was popularly judged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Keywords

Ramsay Brothers, low-budget production, censorship, piracy

They were the Ramsinghania Radio and Electric Company of Karachi before they were the Ramsay Brothers of Bombay. Before Partition, the family owned a big 14-door showroom in Karachi, the Ramsinghania Radio and Electric Company. A radio engineer, F.U. Ramsinghania soon found that his business was more popular with the British than was his last name. “They couldn’t say ‘Ramsinghania’, so they would always say ‘Oh Mr Ramsay, Mr Ramsay!’” (Tulsi Ramsay in a personal interview, 2009). The name stuck, traveling with the man and his family across the border in 1947 all the way to Bombay, to a little showroom opposite Apsara Cinema on Lamington Road.1 They came to Bombay, and began their lives all over again. From the Lamington Road showroom, F.U. Ramsay’s seven sons—Shyam, Tulsi, Kiran, Gangu, Keshu, Arjun, Kumar—the Ramsay Brothers, as they came to be known, launched an extraordinary career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry. Using a combination of

Article

BioScope3(2) 123–145

© 2012 Screen South Asia TrustSAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London,New Delhi, Singapore,

Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/097492761200300203

http://bioscope.sagepub.com

Kartik Nair is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University, New York, USA. E-mail: [email protected]



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124 Kartik Nair

documents sourced from the National Film Archive in Pune, ethnographic material drawn from discus-sions with film distributors in Chandini Chowk, and interviews with the Ramsay Brothers themselves, I track a totemic family name and all it stands for—the men, the movies, the mockery, the memory—across the shifting landscape of Bombay Cinema.

“Public Cheekhti Hai!”/“The Public Screams”: The First Flash of Fear

The absence of state support and a stable, centralized infrastructure post-Independence forced the Bombay film industry to develop an internal logic of production. Over time, this internal logic would prove inimical to ‘modernization’ and government control, ensuring a fragmented economy driven by speculative finance. As Valentina Vitali (2008) notes, fragmentation intensified in the 1960s with the division of the industry into camps of established, regular producers on the one hand, and minor produc-ers, many of whom used film production as incubators for undeclared cash, on the other.2 Small-time capitalists with vast personal reserves, these minor producers were ad hoc film financers looking to make a quick buck. Broadly speaking, their focus was on getting capital to move faster by encouraging the speedy production of small-scale films that could circulate outside central exhibition networks (Vitali, 2008, p. 150). In an era in which most films in Bombay were made in 35 mm, low-budget films would also be copied onto 16mm, ensuring playability in small towns and rural markets where older projection equipment was still in use (Vitali, 2008, p. 154). This was precisely the kind of production tactic that made a star out of the wrestler Dara Singh, the success of whose wrestling films in the shadow of “big names” like Raj Kapoor and Shakti Samanta served to signal the viability of low-budget films in Bombay.

It was around this time that the 30-year-old F.U. Ramsay decided to turn ad hoc film producer. He intended filmmaking as a household ritual to keep the family together, something the near-dozen Ramsays would do together. “Tab hamaara kaam clap marna tha” (In those days, our job was to operate the clapper), Tulsi Ramsay recalls of his father’s early adventures (Ramsay, 2009). When Tulsi graduated from St Xavier’s College, his younger brother Shyam had just finished school; both ended up as assist-ants on their father’s production Ek Nanhi Munhi Ladki Thi/There Was A Little Girl (1970), a thriller starring Prithviraj Kapoor, Shatrugan Sinha, and Mumtaaz and directed by Vishram Bedekar.3 An England-trained cinematographer who first established his credentials at Prabhat in Pune, a littérateur and eventual Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novelist, Bedekar allegedly came armed with an attitude that pushed Ek Nanhi Munhi Ladki Thi beyond budget and schedule. “Ghar ki picture thi [It was a family undertaking] but our father could not control it” (Ramsay, 2009). When it turned out to be a considerable disappointment at the box office, F.U. Ramsay was heartbroken.

Production had waylaid him into a maze of over-budget, under-performing films—Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh/Martyr Bhagat Singh with Jairaj and the Bengali actress Sundari (Year N/A); Rustom Sohrab (1963); the Sindhi film Nakuli Shaan/False Pride (1971)—and for a while, it appeared the fam-ily’s fortune would be the same as that of many scouring for success in Bombay. Unbeknownst to F.U. Ramsay, his sons, who were then scampering about as third and fourth assistants, had discovered amidst the absolute wreckage of Ek Nanhi Munhi Ladki Thi the first flash of fear to ignite an extraordinary career.

“We had watched the film [Ek Nanhi Munhi Ladki Thi] with the audience”, Tulsi remembers. While the few viewers who came remained mostly comatose, they could be seen coming to life during the



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The Story of the Ramsay Brothers 125

film’s night-time heist sequence: Prithviraj Kapoor, disguised in a full-body costume, enters a museum. He has gone in to steal something. When the police arrive, Kapoor comes out of the building. The sudden explosion on to the screen of Kapoor’s latex-clad, hideous figure shocked audiences, who gasped and screamed in terror. The Ramsay boys observed the response and returned to tell their father: “Public cheekhti hai” (The public screams). They remember approaching the patriarch, already disenchanted with the movie business and wary of hiring un-cooperative directors, with the idea of the brothers mak-ing an all-out genre film: “Why don’t we make a full-fledged horror movie?” (ibid.)

Tiffin-Box Production: Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972)

While prestige films from major Hollywood studios had found their way to Indian theaters earlier, the late 1960s saw a parallel burgeoning market for minor US-European co-productions (Vitali, 2008). What this meant was that, disparities in exhibition notwithstanding, Bond movies and the horror films of Mario Bava were available to watch at the same time, awakening Indian audiences and film-makers to the fact that commercial cinema was a globally heterogeneous and stratified economy of stars, styles, scales, and genres.

“At that time, we were always watching Dracula and [The] Mummy,” Tulsi Ramsay reminisces. Raised on matinee shows of Terence Fisher and Vincent Price classics, and eager to use everything they had learned on the sets of their father’s films, the brothers were raring to go. “We ordered this book called 5CC.... After reading that,” Tulsi assured me, “anyone can direct a film.” Having hastily trained themselves into various filmmaking capacities, the brothers then assembled their cast, picking the unknowns Shobhana and Imtiaz Khan for the leads (the latter, the brother of Amjad “Gabbar Singh” Khan, was cast “because he wanted to work very badly”). “No need for cars…no need for stars,” Tulsi declared. Everyone—including the lead actors of the film—was packed into a bus to the Governor’s House in Mahabaleshwar. “We say it was a tiffin-box production…it was like a picnic.” (Ramsay, 2009).

Here, on the outskirts of Bombay, at a decrepit colonial mansion rented out at 500 ̀ a day, the brothers split responsibilities: Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay would dispatch directorial duties; Kumar would write the scenes; Keshu would light them while Gangu would lens them; Kiran was usually in charge of sound, and Arjun in charge of post-production and editing. Meanwhile, Mother Ramsay would cook for every-one.4 Wildly enthusiastic, the family visited the local graveyard well past midnight to shoot key scenes, and took advantage of Mahabaleshwar’s hills, woods, and cold nights. All in all, the month-long shoot cost a total of approximately 6–7 lakhs, concluding well within budget and before time. The result was Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche/Beneath Two Yards of Earth (1972), in which a temptress murders a man for his feudal wealth, only to wonder if he really is dead.

Thematically and visually, the film—in its ancient and imperial family house, complete with arches, pillars, and winding staircase; in its rational scientist-hero, bent over strange experiments in his labora-tory; in its attractive ingénue with dubious motives—owed an obvious debt to the then-dominant idiom of British Hammer horror. The nearly 60 films that the Hammer Studios produced through the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s typically concerned a world of love, revenge, and haunting set in sprawling coun-try manors, dramatized using a repertoire of gothic clichés. All these clichés, as gleaned from Hammer films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), were re-assembled by the Ramsays with more affection than accomplishment.5



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126 Kartik Nair

Even as it served as a showcase for the brothers’ distinctive genre ambitions (and limitations), Do Gaz had several other moving parts—bickering servants sketched in for comedy, a greedy uncle lusting after the tijori (vault) keys, a village belle rescued and rehabilitated by the master of the house, and half-a-dozen songs—that ensured the film was not quite the “full-fledged” horror movie they had proposed to their father. That they would never make a headlong plunge into outré territory suggests that the brothers’ interests in experimentation were balanced by their canny commercial instincts, helping create a niche business over a two-decade career.

Made on a fraction of what one would call a movie budget and on an express schedule, with no stars and with an ‘A’ rating, Do Gaz opened in Bombay with few other territories pre-sold (Ramsay, 2009). The Times of India, describing it as “Horror”, placed the film at the bottom of its listings for the weekend and announced its release at Alankar and “other theatres” in Delhi (Times of India, December 15, 1972, p. 2). Over the first weekend, it had exploded into a sizeable hit. Tulsi states: “Friday—all shows full, Saturday—all shows full, Sunday—all shows full, Monday—all shows full…My brother called from Delhi. He said ‘Don’t sell the movie! Our picture is a hit!’” (Ramsay, 2009).

As the brothers signed deals for one territory after another, eager distributors deployed thousands of six-sheeters across the nation in a very loud publicity campaign that covered alleys, theaters, and the kiosks of paan-wallahs; even today, people who never watched Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche remember seeing a poster at the South Extension-I bus stop in New Delhi in 1972.6 On Vividh Bharti, a 30-minute ‘preview’ of the film featuring voice artist Sheel Kumar speaking over excerpts from the film’s soundtrack aired close to midnight (Times of India, December 15, 1972, p. 2):7

He would say “Watch Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, the new Ramsay Brothers fi lm, tonight… Close your doors, close your windows…” Then, there would be sounds of the heroine screaming, of the hero saying to her “You are imagining things!”…Then a song… In the evenings, we could hear the radios being turned up in all the houses in the neighbourhood... (Ramsay, 2009)

“Our film was a small film,” notes Tulsi, “But it was a big hit.” (ibid.) Such success of course suggests the film’s kinship with other products circulating in Indian markets since the 1960s (the films of Dara Singh, especially). Yet, the arithmetic on Do Gaz had assumed truly alchemical proportions; in a 2003 interview, Tulsi Ramsay revealed: “Even 30 years later, we’re still collecting receipts from it…” (Kurien, 2003).

While the Brothers were busy cutting costs on Do Gaz, it seemed like Bombay’s big-budget movies were just getting bigger. Whereas the 1960s had set the Technicolor template for exotic foreign-location and hill-station shoots with Love in Tokyo (Pramod Chakraborty, 1966), Shakti Samant’s An Evening in Paris (1967) and Aradhana/Worship (1969), it was in the 1970s that the trade jargon of “multi-starrers” and “silver jubilees” gained currency.8 Ramesh Sippy’s “curry-western” Sholay/Embers (1975), for example, was dismissed before its release as heedless indulgence, an overblown action extravaganza beyond anything Bombay had ever dared to produce; it was the industry’s first 1-crore-plus film. Featuring a volley of big names, expensive sets, and international-caliber stunt work, it was also India’s first 70mm film with stereophonic sound (Chopra, 2000). Its legendary triumph at the box office not only set the professional golden standard for aspiring ‘blockbusters’, it also made a gargantuan figure out of Amitabh Bachchan. Magnifying the appeal he had been building since the success of Zanjeer/Chains (Prakash Mehra, 1973) and Deewar/Wall (Yash Chopra, 1975) Sholay paved the way for an endless procession of hits that made Bachchan a superstar without precedent,9 a “one-man industry”



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who effectively re-aligned Bombay Cinema’s melodramatic idiom and became the iconic face of popular cinema in the 1970s. In the underbrush of this monumental landscape lay the feral, fertile cottage industry of the Ramsay Brothers, an altogether different economy distinguished by its internal star system, fierce publicity tactics, and invisible revenue patterns.

Cottage Industry of Terror

Starting in 1972 with Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, the Ramsay Brothers averaged nearly one film for every year in the business till the early 1990s. Their filmography includes Andhera/Darkness (1975), Darwaza/Door (1978), Aur Kaun?/Who Else? (1979), Guest House (1980), Saboot/Proof (1980), Dahshat/Terror (1981), Sannata/Silence (1981), Hotel (1981), Purana Mandir/Ancient Temple (1984), Saamri (1985), Telephone (1985), Tahkhana/Dungeon (1986), Dak Bangla/Post House (1987), Veerana/Desolation (1988), Purani Haveli/Ancient Mansion (1989), Shaitani Ilaka/Haunted Territory (1989), Bandh Darwaza/Closed Door (1990), and Mahakaal/Apocalypse (1993).

“They weren’t interested in silver jubilee runs,” says distributor Sanjay Mehta, adding, “they made their films for a few lakhs, and sold it for a few more lakhs…there was lots of local-level publicity, and the film ran for two or three weeks…That was enough” (Mehta, 2009). Reports in Film Information10 suggest that the Ramsays had discovered principal markets in a hinterland of B-, C-, and D-centers, allowing them to escape the tyranny of the exhibition monopoly that had historically controlled more prestigious circuits.11 A film would be released on a dozen prints in Bombay’s less-favored “neighbor-hood” theaters. By the second week, that number would drop to ten; by the third week, only a print or two would remain in circulation in Bombay. By this time, the film would have begun its journey into the interiors, playing on one screen in Pune in its fourth week, and one screen in Wai in its seventh week. It never ran anywhere for more than a few weeks, but short-term contracts with distributors on “re-issue rights” meant that films could be re-released over and over again for the next few years. “Ramgarh, Jamgarh, Bamgarh…” Tulsi says, “Jahaan pe train bhi nahin rukti hain na, wahaan business hota tha humara” (Places where even the trains don’t stop, that’s where our business was) (Ramsay, 2009). “Yahaan pe dhol bajaate the announce karne ke liye” (They would play the drums to announce the screening) (ibid.). Whereas Sholay’s grandeur had convinced many to shoot in 35mm and blow it up to 70mm, the Ramsays were improving on Dara Singh by making their films on 16mm and then blowing it up to 35mm for urban exhibition (Mehta, 2009). Outside the cities, at low-capacity, sometimes-makeshift theaters fitted for 16mm projection, their movies found dedicated audiences for nearly 20 years. Thanks to informal contracts with distributors, this was very likely the dedicated “space” of the Ramsay film.

Trade wisdom suggests the Ramsays did 60 per cent of their business in rural territories, where returns are slower, smaller, and clouded with administrative haziness (Nahta, 2009). As Nitin Govil points out, box-office figures in Bombay have historically been delivered with a “casual” attitude, the “lack of seriousness and organization,” the “occult significance of black money” guaranteeing the industry’s chronic “improvisational nature” (Govil, 2010). Figures in Film Information represent only the tip of the box-office iceberg, since the journal does not record revenues from B-, C-, and D- centers, each with their own (tax) evasive histories (Nahta, 2009). There is in addition the problem of the journal’s veracity, fueled by Tulsi Ramsay’s unexpected and somewhat enigmatic comment midway



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128 Kartik Nair

through our meeting: “We were always after Film Information. Report should come good, should come good” (Ramsay, 2009). On a later date, he explained why small-time filmmakers were in thrall to the trade guides:

These trade papers [Film Information, Trade Guide] were enjoying a tyrannical reign, people were scared of them…If the report comes good, if the fi lm is [a] “hit” in Bombay, then the price for it in Delhi doubles from 4 lakhs to 8 lakhs. But if a bad report comes…Today, because of simultaneous releases, no one even cares about them. (Ramsay, T., 2010)

Further complications arise with the family’s slippery corporate identity. While the Ramsay Brothers presently retain an office on Lamington Road with the banner “Ramsay Films”, films were sometimes produced by “Ramsay Films Combine” (Purana Mandir), sometimes by “Ramsay International” (Tahkhana), at other times by the “Ramsay Cine Corporation” (Mahakaal), or recently the “Ramsay House of Horrors” (“My wife runs that,” Tulsi quickly clarified) (Ramsay, 2009). Moreover, a visit to the Lamington Road office in November 2009 was a dead-end, with people inside the office telling me the Ramsays no longer worked out of that address!

Perhaps all of this explains why, when I showed Tulsi Ramsay a gorgeous, two-page, full-color reproduction of a poster for the Ramsay film Ek Andheri Raat/One Dark Night, he could not quite place it: “Ye kaun si film hai? Yeh to humaari nahin hai…Ye humaari hai kya?...” (Which film is this? This is not our film…Is this our film?...) (Ramsay, T., 2010). I had seen the advertisement in a 1986 issue of Film Information, but have since found no other references to it in any source (Film Information, December 13, 1986). The curious incident might be explained as a consequence of those recessive and countless “re-issue” contracts, which give distributors the right to re-print posters for films they are re-releasing, effectively freeing them to re-order and even renovate crucial poster elements, including the title of the film. One can only speculate that Ek Andheri Raat might once have been the Ramsays’ Andhera/Darkness…

The persistence of this business model for the Ramsays enhanced the opacity around the family enter-prise. They were derided by industry heavyweights and offset by the likes of Raveekant Nagaich and Rajkumar Kohli, filmmakers who were inspired by the Ramsays to dip their toes in the fecund pools of horror. Kohli and Nagaich were nonetheless eager to assert their A-list credentials in warding off (inevi-table) comparisons, and invariably fared better with English-language critics.12 Nagaich’s possession-and-pundit movie Jadu Tona/Black Magic (1977), starring Feroze Khan, Ashok Kumar, and Reena Roy, was proclaimed by Film Information as being “a magical piece of photography…more suited for the big-city audience” (emphasis mine) (Film Information, February 25, 1978).13 In another review, Harish Kumar Mehra marvels at the film’s “masterly handling” and craft which would have “done credit even to a foreign director…”; the critic finds himself hard-pressed to “remember seeing ever before an Indian horror movie of such effectiveness” (Mehra, 1978).

While big-city theaters screened Nagaich’s film, along with The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) (Film Information, January 28, 1978),14 the Ramsays’ 1978 film Darwaza took flight into the interiors following an “excellent” opening in Bombay (Film Information, February 25, 1978). Their formidable commercial reputation meant that the brothers could now recruit the likes of Anil Dhawan and Anju Mahendru in the lead, whose star-wattage represented a significant improvement on Do Gaz. In the film, Dhawan plays Suraj, heir to an aristocratic fortune who falls in love with the lissome Rachna (Mahendru). But this budding romance is interrupted when Suraj learns of an



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ancient curse that has followed his family down the centuries all the way from a hill-top haveli (mansion) in the village of Shimago. The principal action of the film involves Suraj and Rachna traveling back to Shimago to discover the origins of this curse on his khandan (family). When they finally get to Shimago, the couple learns from local villagers that they need to defeat a monster to vanquish the curse. Under the light of a full moon, wading through the fog, the two make it to a subterranean lair where they encounter the hideous beast. A chase ensues, leading to a Durga temple, where Suraj, Rachna, and the village mob sing a devotional tune and finally exterminate the monster.

Lalitha Pawar also has a cameo in Darwaza as the house-keeper of a dak bangla (rest house) that emerges out of the mist on the road from Bombay to the hills. White mop on her head, the folds of a white sari overwhelming her frame, face caked generously with chalk, Pawar ambles about with a candle to light what is supposed to be pitch darkness. This scene exposes the inconclusive nature of the brothers’ expertise; problems with night-time shoots persist, in addition to a general sense of workshop-improvisation. When I inquired about how they staged the film’s climax of a leaves-and-dust windstorm, Tulsi smiled: “We used the discarded propellers of airplanes” (Ramsay, T., 2010).

“Things today are so professional, there are prop shops,” Ramsay star Arti Surendranath reminds me. “Those days, we had to beg, borrow, do anything”, she recalls of working with the Ramsay Brothers.

Image 1. At the recording of Ramsay Pictures’ Aur Kaun are Tulsi Ramsay, Dina, Sachin, Kishore Kumar, Bappi Lahiri and Amit Khanna.

Source: Film Information, December 31, 1977, 5.14.



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130 Kartik Nair

“Even if you needed a sofa—everything would be in-house, we would all go around collecting stuff” (Surendranath, 2010). Photographs from the 1970s (Image 1) show the brothers working with Bappi Lahiri on the soundtrack for film after film. Lahiri, the “R.D. Burman of B Movies,” (Willemen and Rajadhyaksha, 2004, p. 136) had been propelled into the limelight by a meteoric rise against the odds which made him something of a kindred spirit to the family. The Brothers never worked with bona fide stars (perhaps because they could not afford them), often drawing their talent from an alternative circuit of television and beauty pageants. They relied on fresh, young blood to lubricate their productions: the appeal of quick money without the hassles of high-maintenance stars. Rather than marquee value, their chief contribution was an ability to energize generic plot treatments; they were rewarded with niche stardom, returning to work with the family again in roles only superficially distinguished from one another. A case in point is Surendranath, a model who had dabbled in film-work previously but made the decisive transition by starring in a series of Ramsay films in the mid-1980s (see Images 2a, 2b, and 2c). Of Mohnish Behl, Nutan’s son, Filmfare is “tempted to ask him how or why he took up certain films like [the Ramsays’] Purana Mandir, which in industry jargon would be described as B-grade” (Filmfare, September 1983, p. 6). Another Ramsay favorite was Puneet Issar, who, as the thrower of the punch that had nearly killed Bachchan on the sets of Coolie (Desai, 1983), was enjoying a stardom that was entirely a side-effect of Bachchan’s.

The Ramsays ran a tight ship indeed, one that rode the tail of the tidal wave of mega-movies and multi-starrers. No one knew that this tidal wave, then cresting on behemoth budgets and orgiastic spectacles, was soon going to hit the hostile shores of the 1980s. Only frugal discipline, which had enabled the Ramsays to first canvass territory on the margins of the industry, could now ensure survival through Bombay Cinema’s darkest time.

Striking Gold in the Dead of Night

The video boom, now at its peak, is bound to go downhill soon. Video viewing is sure to affect vision as it immo-bilizes the movement of the retina (the elasticity of the retina is reduced). Again, the joys of watching a fi lm in 35mm or 70mm splendour are far greater than on a 20-inch screen...(Dutt, 1983, p. 5)

The 1980s are remembered today as the decade in which commercial cinema was displaced by televi-sion sets and video cassette recorders (VCRs). “Even if cinema as an institution [was] not waning in the public imagination”, writes Lalitha Gopalan, “the rise of adjacent entertainment industries...threaten[ed]

Image 2(a, b, c). The Ramsays’ Shower Sequence: Starlet Surendranath in a Swimsuit (Purana Mandir, 1984)

Source: DVD Grab from Mondo Macabro, The Bollywood Horror Collection, Vol. 1. 2006. Boum Productions.



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to diminish the power of films” (Gopalan, 2002, p. 4). Video and television, wrote Iqbal Masood in 1985, “have spread shock waves through the 500 million rupee [film] industry”:

With an estimated fi ve million TV sets, and a nightly audience of more than 50 million, a soap opera in a single night has a viewership larger than the entire audience of a hit movie! Film revenues have shot down by 40% from what they were two-and-a-half years ago while unreleased fi lms pile on the shelves...All the classic symptoms ...are here: Falling audience fi gures, the bulldozing of theatres, and a series of fl ops of “big” movies. (Masood, 1985, p. 22)

Video and TV were also supported by a vast “underground” of piracy that quickly infiltrated Indian homes.15 Through video libraries and parlours, viewers were able to watch new Hindi films and as-yet-unreleased Hollywood films. Prompting a “new parallel expansion of the media public” at the cost of older forms of distribution/exhibition, libraries, and parlours “bypass[ed] local laws and film industry prohibitions” (Sundaram, 2010, p. 113). Enforcing the 1984 Copyright Amendment, police raids enthu-siastically apprehended bootleggers and their equipment, even as piracy itself began to assume its impos-sibly viral proportions. TV and Video World reported that “[p]iracy hasn’t been curbed any less in spite of the raids and it is getting increasingly difficult to pinpoint the source of illegal video cassettes”.16 What many had dismissed as a passing fad rapidly morphed into nothing short of a media revolution:

Showcasing the latest releases from Hindi and regional cinema, as well as a reasonable selection of pornogra-phy, video drew people from all walks of life—youth, working people, businessmen, women, and children. The landscape of picturesque India—the great cattle fair in Pushkar in Rajasthan, the hill station in central India, Leh in Ladakh—all bore witness to the turbulence unleashed by video, closing fi lm theatres, bankrupting distributors and a fi lm industry under siege…(Sundaram, 2010, p. 113)

Exhibitors introduced air-conditioning in theaters, while the 1970s spirit of innovation gave way to frequent, frantic novelty products. The pages of trade journals from this period are crowded with produc-tion stills from “capers” like Tony and Agent 009; there are also two-page ads for Terror of the Valley and Bhoot Bangla/Haunted House, the latter billed “India’s first horror comedy”. The Ramsays themselves jumped into the fray with their 1985 offering Saamri, a unique “3D horror film” that was nonetheless addled with exhibition problems when patrons decided to take the special 3-D glasses home with them.17

While the early 1980s had been kind to Ramsay films like Dahshat (Image 3) and Hotel, returns on Purana Mandir (1984) were truly extraordinary. In Purana Mandir, the monster Saamri curses the female heirs of a feudal khandan (family) with horrible deaths incurred at childbirth (Image 4). The latest descendant in the line is the city-dwelling Suman (Arti Surendranath); Suman is in love with Sanjay (Mohnish Behl), and the two can barely keep their hands off one another. This sets alarm-bells ringing in her father’s head. Not having forgotten the curse that has followed them from the rural haveli (man-sion) and will strike Suman should she have a child of her own, the thakur (feudal land owner) tries to break them up. Failing, the distraught father reveals the shraap (curse) that threatens their khandan (line-age). Unfazed, Sanjay and Suman return to the ancestral haveli to confront Saamri. The monster is burnt at the stake by villagers, the curse is lifted, and the couple is married.

In an article titled “The Paradoxical Situation” (1984), V.P. Sathe noted his amazement at the fact that Purana Mandir, “a non-star cast horror adult film”, was released in nearly two-dozen theaters in Bombay, continuing that “at most of the theaters, the picture drew full houses” (Sathe, 1984). “I was in Delhi for five days,” recalls Tulsi:



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Image 3. The Make-up Ran Out! Om Shivpuri and Sarika in the Ramsays’ Dahshat

Source: Filmfare, July 16-31, 1981.

Image 4. Postpartum Pustulation: The Price of Childbearing in Purana Mandir

Source: DVD Grab from Mondo Macabro, The Bollywood Horror Collection, Vol. 1. 2006. Boum Productions.

Purana Mandir was running in Delhi Plaza. I went with my wife and even I could not get into the theatre. I had to tell them—“I am Tulsi Ramsay, this is my picture”—and then also we only got standing space. The people were going wild. But then, on Wednesday, [Prime Minister] Indira [Gandhi] got assassinated. There was a hold on exhibition. On Friday Purana Mandir resumed. By then the city was burning. But I was ignorant, I was happy with my success...(Ramsay, T., 2010)

The fact is that the brothers had struck gold in the dead of night, scoring their biggest hit in the dark cor-ridor of Bombay film history, a corridor reverberating with the doom-and-gloom of falling admissions and the footfalls of film pirates.

Purana Mandir had in fact been diverted to the black market during the very week of its release. From a Bombay video-parlor, police recovered videotape copies of the film, along with the rudimentary tech-nology being used for exhibition:“Video cassettes of Purana Mandir which was being shown to about 75 persons was seized from the parlour…. The police also seized a Nelco VCR, Weston TV, and Rs 105 in cash. Mohd. Rafiq and Mohd. Shafi were arrested” (Film Information, October 27, 1984).

A fiction fed to sustain the myth of “good money”, to discriminate between pirates and producers, the dimly perceived, probably mafia-run, shadow economy of bootlegging could make the meanest financiers—even the Ramsays—look like clean citizens!

Cutting Veerana: A Bloodbath behind the Scenes

Let us return to that report on the Purana Mandir piracy raid. The film had already been certified “Adult” by the Central Board for Film Certification, so imagine the surprise of the police when they entered the



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parlor to find that “many children were seeing the film at the time of the raid” (ibid.). The censors may be out to “save” our families, but the pirates are out to “destroy” them. Through the 1980s, film produc-ers were regularly abused by editorials and readers in Filmfare for amplifying sex and violence in their movies as a way to bring audiences back into theaters (Filmfare September 1987, p. 20). Invariably, these movies wound up in video parlors and libraries soon after release. Saraswathy Aiyer, a concerned citizen writing to Filmfare in late 1982, is “shocked” at the manner in which “well-to-do homes” are lit-tered with “Adults Only films and porno films...available for viewing at the touch of a button” (Aiyer, 1982). Aiyer is specifically incensed by the sight of a friend’s drawing room, “scattered” about which she finds cassette of big-banner rape films like Insaf Ka Tarazu/Scales of Justice (B.R. Chopra, 1980) and Prem Rog/Love Sick (Raj Kapoor, 1982), as well as the “see-it-before-it-is-banned” vigilante film Meri Awaaz Suno/Listen to My Voice (S.V. Rajendra Singh, 1981).18 Worse than the scourge of copyright vio-lation, piracy and videotape verge on “video nasty” territory, promising to foil censorship’s best-laid plans by turning our homes into dens of vice. 19

Film censorship in British India is generally seen as beginning with the passing of the Cinematograph Act of 1918, which authorized the colonial government to censor potentially inflammatory material on at least two accounts—that it might be a cultural “misrepresentation” of the West or that it might incite insurrection among the “natives” (Jaikumar, 2007). The idea that film exercises awesome powers on the public “set a pattern for post-Independence censorship practices, where the state perceives films as hav-ing a tremendous influence over its citizenry and thus directs its regulations towards the production and control of ‘quality’ films” (Gopalan, 2002, p. 36). Soon after Independence, the state amended the Cinematograph Act to create the “A” (adult) and “U” (unrestricted) categories of film exhibition, and in 1952, the state was authorized to form a Board of Film Censors, eventually named the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

During the 1930s, the decade in which horror first came under the scanner in the West, an American version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was gaining notoriety across the Indian subcontinent as “The Picture Banned in Bengal” (Filmland, Puja No. 32, p. 62). This is almost certainly Rouben Mamoulian’s Oscar-winning 1931 adaptation; the imperial ban is hardly a surprise given that the film’s release in England was itself much-protested.20 In the hallowed tradition of European and American film censorship, the rules for horror films in India would always be different. Indian audiences watching the The Exorcist felt it so “ruthlessly censored” that it prompted one viewer in Salem to wonder if the day will come when “instead of showing the film they will merely show the title and then draw the curtain!”21 By December of 1978, the Press Information Bureau had in any case issued a notice for the suspension of exhibition of this heavily cut version of the film—“Exorcist (Revised)”, as it came to be known—and Nagaich’s Jadu Tona with “immediate effect for a period of 2 months” (Press Information Bureau, 1978).

“If censorship is to be enforced on sound democratic lines and for the good of the masses,” quips Dr C.G. Thakur in Star & Style, “the censors cannot pick and choose producers and artists for the use of their official yard-stick: One code is applied in censoring foreign movies, the second code for Raj Kapoor films and the third for the other Indian movies” (Mehta, 2001).22 According to Monika Mehta, the easy passing of Raj Kapoor’s much-protested 1978 film Satyam Shivam Sundaram/Truth God Beauty without any cuts suggests that the censors were “not only attentive to a film’s ‘socio-cultural setting’, but also to who produced the film... the censors’ assessment of a producer’s symbolic capital is crucial in making aesthetic and moral judgments about a film” (Mehta, 2001, p. 40).23



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In 1978, Rajkumar Kohli’s star-studded horror film, Jaani Dushman/Mortal Enemy, attracted contro-versy when it was embroiled in an epic, 11-month censorship battle that went all the way to the High Court before concluding in Kohli’s favor. In a 1982 issue of Star & Style, Kohli looks back at the 11-month ordeal; the censors, who had hoped a lady judge presiding over the case would support them, were ultimately defeated. “They probably thought that since ladies were being killed in my film that a lady judge wouldn’t pass it” (Star & Style, April–May 1982, p. 17).

“We were very strict in the [19]70s,” admits CBFC official Vinayak Azad, “but the producers would also push their luck” (Azad, 2010). Not surprisingly, the CBFC was always ready to exercise its dubious discretionary powers where low-budget horror films were concerned. Not blessed with the same resources as Kohli, the Ramsay Brothers were mostly at the mercy of the arbitrary powers of the Censor Board.24 Surviving documents for the Ramsays’ Veerana reveal a virtual blood-bath behind the scenes, with a total of 46 cuts taking out nearly 700 feet from the film (Veerana Endorsement, 1988). While there is no record at the CBFC of Veerana ever having been banned outright,25 Tulsi Ramsay has claimed on two separate occasions that the film was banned, and went on to say “Buhut mushkil hui thi [It was a lot of trouble]…It spoilt one whole year…Went to a committee…Then it went to the Delhi Tribunal” (Ramsay, 2009).

In Veerana, a beautiful, blood-sucking chudail (witch) named Nakita (Jasmin) stalks the lonely out-skirts of a village. Every night, she intercepts young men going home to the village and lures them to an abandoned haveli (mansion). Sex provides the occasion for the kill. Determined to end the witch’s reign of terror, Sameer (Vijayendra Ghatge), the son of the local thakur (aristocrat), accompanies Nakita back to her haveli one night. The two proceed to strip and slip into a bubble-bath. In the course of some risqué banter, Sameer catches the chudail unawares and overpowers her. In short order, she ends up lynched by the village mob.

Just the previous year, the Ramsay Brothers had produced Dak Bangla, in which the monster Ozo is driven by his havas (lust) to attack and rape the eklauti beti (only daughter) of Thakur Mann Singh. While Ozo is then torn to shreds by the thakur’s men, he appears to have passed the censors unscathed. In one sequence, we watch in unseemly detail as his severed limbs are sown back together by faithful henchmen. Indeed, the Brothers had built a whole career on images of the monstrous, but the CBFC seemed particularly incensed by Veerana, subjecting it to two extensive revisions and nearly 50 cuts. Some of these cuts took lines out of the risqué banter—“Double meaning dialogue of Sameer deleted ‘Tumhare Jism Ke Har Raaj Ko Dekhna Chahta Hoon’ [‘I want to see every secret of your body’], while others asked for the ‘Shot of Nakita removing her clothes and camera pans on Sameer looking, deleted’” (Veerana Endorsement, 1988). Six cuts centered on scenes in which Nakita descends on her victims. The Board, for instance, had the Ramsays “Delete the visuals of the witch cutting the hand of the man, suck-ing the blood as well as her blood-stained teeth” (ibid.). Another trio of cuts tempered the mob’s fury in the lynching sequence, including a demand to “reduce drastically” the “Brutal shots of people throwing and beating ‘Chudel’ when she is tied” (ibid.). One can never know for sure what it was about Veerana that set the disciplinary scissors snipping. Note, though, that this was the first (and last) Ramsay film to feature a female monster.

Other cuts ordered on Veerana range from the banal (“Delete the visuals of the strong man being kicked in the crotch, wherever it occurs”) to the bizarre (“Delete all reference to the doctor as ‘Psychiatrist’ wherever they occur”); others are more memorable, such as the instruction to “Reduce to a flash the visual of the suicide of ‘Choti Bahu’ [Young Daughter-in-law] by hanging” and, in what is surely a typographical catastrophe, to “Delete visuals of Raghu peeing [sic] through a hole when Jasmine



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is in the bathroom” (ibid.).26 As to the last of these, the Board helpfully suggests that the deleted images be “Replaced with approved shots of Raghu loitering in Haveli” (ibid.). Ramsay Horror, with its osten-sible stock-in-trade of sex and violence, was energized by the efforts of both censors and pirates, cops and robbers. As a cinematic form, the Ramsay film also provoked a voluble press discourse, especially when it became a flashpoint in the pages of Filmfare magazine.

The Fault Lines of Cinematic Taste: Filmfare Debates the Ramsays

If you were a villager living in Heggodu in early 1978, chances are you enjoyed a screening of Ray’s Pather Panchali/Song of the Road (1955) or De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) or perhaps Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Brought in by the film club Chitra Samaj on loan from the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), these and other classics were part of a six-day cinematic extravaganza covered by Filmfare’s K.S. Raghavendra. Here, in a forgotten village 400 kilometers from Bangalore, Chitra Samaj was conducting nothing less than a social sciences experiment, waiting and watching the residents of Heggodu: would they take time out of tilling fields and milking cows to lap up a bit of Eisensteinian montage? (They did.) “In a country where Sholay and Jai Santoshi Maa/Glory to Santoshi [Vijay Sharma, 1975] both turn out to be box office hits,” announces Raghavendra, “an experiment of this kind is of revolutionary importance”27

With this experimental programme, the pseudo-highbrow notion that laymen, especially the rustic, cannot appre-ciate fi lms of artistic excellence comes to an end. Speaking relatively, villagers, probably can respond to human situations more heartily and spontaneously than the city-bred elite...(the Government) could initiate and encour-age a 16 mm movement in the country, and involve the 70 per cent of the country’s population which at present is out of the sophisticated cultural scene. (Raghavendra, 1978)

As we have seen in our discussion of the circuits of the Ramsay film, there was of course already a healthy 16 mm movement coursing through India’s villages; it was just not the one Filmfare liked. Visibly invested in the dream of a “good” cinema, Filmfare had since the 1950s explicitly supported state intervention in the film industry, printed a wealth of articles on international cinema for the edification of its readers, and instituted the annual Filmfare awards as a way to reward those who forwarded the cause of cinema’s uplift.

Indeed, the “question” of cinema resurfaced with force in the 1970s. To rescue audiences from Bombay’s crassly commercial formula films and flimsy Hollywood imitations, the state decided to finally give Indians the “good cinema” Bombay had failed to provide since Independence. To counter the baleful effects of incoherent song-and-dance melodramas, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) began funding a realist “New Wave”. By training filmmakers at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and then green-lighting their projects, the FFC was aiming for an ambitious auteur-driven “New Wave.” Without a doubt intended as “an intervention in the Indian film industry as a whole,” (author’s emphasis) the FFC grew through the late 1960s and early 1970s to control distribution, export, the supply of raw stock, and the importing of films for local distribution (Rajadhyaksha, 2009, p. 233). In striking ways, the FFC had briefly drawn money, aesthetics and politics into a knot, generating a substantive interroga-tion of commercial cinema. Editorials in film-based magazines through the late 1970s and early 1980s attacked the mass-entertainment cinema as a meaningless, orgiastic spectacle of stars, songs, dance, and



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melodramatic excess. At first, a breakaway cinema seemed to really be in the offing, crystallizing some-where between the “undeclared avant garde gesture” of Kumar Shahani’s work and the “explicitly avant garde” turn in Mani Kaul’s early films.28 Ultimately, however, the FFC project was a disappointment, perhaps felled by distribution and exhibition issues (as well as broader philosophical disagreements). Filmfare had already spilt much ink on the good cinema/bad cinema debate in the 1970s; in the 1980s, as we shall see, the magazine continued to revisit the moment by deflection. (Filmfare Editor B.C. Karanjia, having played an important role at the FFC, in the late 1960s and early 1970s was an outspoken supporter of the New Wave.)

Coverage of the Ramsay Brothers in Filmfare was accompanied by a near-consistent tone of superiority. In a 1981 article for the magazine, N. Nair asks, “What Makes Full Houses Full?” (Nair, 1981). His search leads him to Bombay’s horror films. “For some time now,” observes Nair, “the Ramsays and others have made convulsive attempts at making horror movies, inspired by similar films from the West”. These attempts, according to him, have only “spawned some truly grotesque creations”, with “goo and monsters” that are “nowhere near the awesome technical masterpieces that Spielberg’s creations are”. All the Ramsay films, in Nair’s estimation, have “consistently failed to click…Of those that gathered courage and crept in to see them, many returned laughing uproariously—no doubt a natural reaction to the horror they saw.”... “If at all these films inspire awe,” Nair intones, “it must surely be for the fact that they continue to be made” (Nair, 1981). A few years later in a letter to Filmfare, reader Anthony Henriques condemns the Ramsays for “relying on second-hand imitations” of American films (Henriques, 1988). Despite India offering an “eager audience for horror movies, as proved by their popu-larity on the video circuit,” Henriques finds it “rather strange and surprising that hardly any movies of this genre are made in India”; as for the horror films being made currently, “the few attempts made at scaring Indian audiences, especially by the Ramsay Brothers, have been mostly laughable….” (Henriques, 1988/1985).

In January of 1985, by which time it was already declared the second-biggest hit of 1984, the Ramsays’ Purana Mandir was the subject of a lengthy review in Filmfare. Written by Pritish Nandy, the piece was titled “Indiana Jones Returns to the Temple of Gloom”, and continued the magazine’s tone of scathing ridicule (Nandy, 1985, pp. 62–63).29 Nandy is not above taking pot-shots at the Brothers’ budgetary con-straints; he sees nothing to admire in the film, only a “purana mandir where the cardboard walls are falling off and you need yards of cellotape just to keep Shiva’s trident upright” and a monster “wearing an ill-fitting jute wig and a reject FUs unisex maxi.” The movie’s lead, a young Mohnish Behl, appears to Nandy like “he’s caught the last flight from Ethiopia, after the famine got them all”, while its heroine, Arti Surendranath, strikes him as a “badly made martini.” Nandy is also probably in consternation at the film’s success, evinced in his failure to mention even once that it is a monumental hit on any scale. Instead, like Nair, he speculates disingenuously that everyone who goes to see it “wants the gate money back, while the ushers hide under the chairs.” The review concludes thus, “One cannot but help admiring the sensitivity and intelligence with which this film has been made. It speaks volumes for Hindi cinema and the Ramsays, our horror movie moghuls, who have [with this film] graduated towards serious, thought-provoking cinema of a kind rarely seen before” (Nandy, 1985).

Claims of a “serious, thought-provoking cinema…rarely seen before” had come and gone recently with all the other claims of the New Wave. Nandy not only suggests that the aesthetically bankrupt Ramsays are basking in the debacle of the New Wave; he also hints that their success may have some-thing to do with the failure of the avant-garde project. But it was, after all, this rearguard of kitsch that had gotten a two-page spread from Nandy, suggesting the simultaneously seductive and repellent quality



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exuded by the Ramsay phenomenon, the hypnotic effect that mass culture often has on middle-class intellectuals.30 Why, after all, would audiences submit themselves not only to Sholay but also to a motley of lesser forms? All kinds of flotsam littered the cinematic backwaters: mythological productions and horror films, the “former usually on a level with the roadside stage performances during the Ganapati festival and the latter frequently more hideous than frightening” (Nair, 1981, pp. 46–47). In a booklet accompanying the Film Utsav of 1985, Iqbal Masood marveled at the contemporary abundance of a “Rampant Lowbrow Cinema” consisting of titles like Bapaiah’s Mawaali (1983) and Maqsad/Aim (1984), the “Lower Kitsch” of Sita Kalyanam (Sattiraju Lakshminarayana, 1976) and the “Higher Kitsch” of Shankarabharanam (K. Vishvanath, 1979; Masood, 1985, pp. 20–25). These were the prod-ucts with which the “disgusting and shoddy” (Nair, 1981, p. 47) films of the Ramsay Brothers jostled for space in the 1970s and 1980s.

Pritish Nandy had no doubt read his brother Ashis’s piece in a special issue of the IIC Quarterly from 1981. Laying forth ideas, he would refine for his seminal 1987 piece, “An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema.” Ashis Nandy inaugurated a re-consideration of popular film as a successful form of mass-cultural mediation. The commercial cinema’s blatant lack of realism and simplistic morality made it a successful form of “low-brow” cultural mediation, able to address the fears and pressures accompanying modernity.31 However condescending Nandy may sound, one cannot easily reject his claim that commercial cinema—in all its spectacular, status-quoist, and de-psychologized glory—speaks to the widest audience possible. Forcing a re-consideration of the discourse around mass culture by interrupting easy dismissals of commercial cinema’s appeal as the ideological “effect” of a Culture Industry, Nandy pushes us to confront popular cinema as structured by desire, anxiety, and pleasure.

In this vein, and as virtuosos of the cinematic badlands of the 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers also attracted notice in “Love at First Bite” (1985), Roscoe Mendonza’s remarkable dissenting essay in Filmfare (Mendonza, 1985, pp. 75–79). Less like Pritish and more like Ashis, Mendonza never dismisses the emphatic success experienced by the family enterprise, noting that they “strike a chord” in a “video-battered universe.” While Nair laughed at their “convulsive attempts” and “goo and monsters,” and Nandy scoffed at their cardboard-and-cello tape production values and anemic actors, Mendonza sees a “committed cinema” that espouses a “clannish modus operandi” and an “alternative star-system”:

Cinematically, the directors of these fi lms excel in their use of cliché and stereotype to convey their message. What appears to the critic as a worn-out scene is what it actually is in reality…It is no use staging an elaborate sequence, which might be extraordinary to look at, but where the fear is not palpable. Horror is a tangible com-modity and it is necessary for audiences to perceive the cause of their terror before they understand it. (Ibid.)

Mendonza’s most interesting tack is to see a style where his colleagues only saw shambles. “Even though the films might not have the sophistication of Kubrick’s The Shining or the veneer of Herzog’s Nosferatu,” he writes, “they are as complex and sharp in their dissection of the institution of fear.” Mendonza’s claim, however far-fetched, is a rebuke to the Heggodu experiment: that the Ramsay films allow a cathartic encounter with the fears inspired by modernity. “To the laity, the baying of dogs at midnight, thunder and lightning are all symbols of terror.” Conducting an “exorcist’s ritual on a mass scale”, these films—not those of Saeed Mirza or Mrinal Sen, or those of “commercial cinema”—cut to the truth of the “Indian psyche.” In a half-winking, implicit and obvious rebuttal to Nandy, Mendonza expressed bound-less hope that a future re-evaluation would show the brothers to have been no less than auteur geniuses.



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“It is not jingoism that makes me crow that Hitch[cock], with all his 53 films, could not manage what our Ramsays have done with their ten odd movies” (ibid.).

Passing through the press mill of Filmfare, the Ramsays turned the pages of this famously pro-parallel cinema magazine into a cultural war-zone, helping to carry forward the irresolutions of the cinema ques-tion. In hindsight, it is clear now that the Filmfare debates were revisiting the 1970s—an era lit by the promises of the New Wave, by way of the 1980s—the decisive abyss of Bombay film history. There are echoes in this proxy war of Pierre Bourdeiu’s famous claim that “taste” is crucially produced through an assertion of distaste, a “visceral intolerance for the tastes of others” (as cited in Sconce, 1995).32 Inspired by Bourdeiu, Jeffrey Sconce (1995) has argued that viewers who champion “bad cinema”—Sconce labels them a “paracinematic” audience—cannot be dismissed as being innocently uncultured. A parac-inematic audience, writes Sconce, “likes to see itself as a disruptive force in the cultural and intellectual marketplace”, suggesting a “pitched battle between a guerilla band of cult film viewers and an elite cadre of would-be cinematic tastemakers” (1995, p. 372). Neither Nandy nor Mendonza in that sense was particularly interested in the Ramsay Brothers; instead, the Ramsays were positioned at the other end of the spectrum from the FFC project, a strategically deployed proxy that could focalize the debate over commercial cinema’s legitimacy.

Ironically, the Ramsay Brothers could barely be legitimized as an example of “Bombay Cinema”, having eked out a career on the industry’s periphery; though wildly popular, they are not even part of what one remembers as “popular cinema” in these decades, a form that had Amitabh Bachchan’s visage plastered all over it; and finally, they were far too visible, and had too large a following in those years to be contained within the category of “cult film”. Instead, there was something about the Ramsay Brothers that made them representative of mass culture at its meanest, exemplifying the explosive potential of small quantities moving in large force-fields.

But it was not to last. The Ramsay formula, which had lured up-market names like Nagaich and Kohli, had also long-fertilized a virtual army of B-filmmakers from different parts of the country. Their films, only provisionally different from one another (Darwaza, Bandh Darwaza; Saaya, Maut Ka Saaya), were also attractively cheap and easy to imitate. Leading the charge was Mohan Bakhri, whose latest venture Khooni Mahal (1987), seemed to be elbowing for space with the Ramsays’ Dak Bangla (1987). In a 1987 article, Filmfare wryly commented on the “fast-multiplying clan of Ramsays”, a school of producers adept at imitating the “Ramsay Brothers’ time-worn strategy of scaring people for a fast buck” (Filmfare September 1987, pp. 19–21). In a 1993 interview, Tulsi blamed the competition for the dilution of the Ramsay “brand-name”:

Horror movies got a bad name because people like Mohan Bakhri and Vinod Talwar have tried to imitate us without ever matching our quality. They added a lot of cheap cabarets and faltu sex scenes to draw in the char anna classes. Their fi lms didn’t work and we suffered. Since we’re a brand name, every horror movie—good or bad—is identifi ed with us. (Saxena, 1993, pp. 92–94)

There are wheels within wheels here. For his part, Mohan Bakhri claims that “the decline of our horror movies came when other small producers saw we were making money,” so they “all started making hor-ror movies…every month, 2 or 3 movies were released” (Bakhri, 2006).

By the time F.U. Ramsay passed away in 1989, the sun was beginning to set on the Ramsay empire. In 1990, the expensive Bandh Darwaza was a colossal failure, summoning only 50 percent business in its opening week and sliding out of sight two weeks later (Film Information, 1990). When their business



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came to a close in the early 1990s, it appears as if the brothers just fell away from the family unit, finally causing the dissipation of this disturbance from Bombay Cinema.

Conclusion

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers were seen as holding out against the industry’s march to cultural legitimacy, the profane icons of an imagined attack from below on abstract ideas of white-collar respectability, aesthetic accomplishment, and economic transparency. These seven men were a kind of apparition on the popular horizon, their films reviving memories of Indian cinema at the origins: memories of those awkward Mélièsian mythologicals, those rural road-shows and traveling cinemas, those “joint-family” efforts of such pioneers as Phalke. Yet, it was their espousal of a keep-it-in-the-family work ethic, a flagrant anti-realism, and a nebulous backwaters economy that allowed them to find success in the first place.

When the Ramsay Brothers finally folded in the early 1990s, Keshu Ramsay dropped his last name and began a string of collaborations with an aspiring action star named Akshay Kumar33, while Shyam and Tulsi parlayed the residual infamy of their family name into a move to television. The Ramsays’ Zee Horror Show (1993–1998) managed to stand out even on Zee TV,34 a network renowned for its “shabby production values” and “impossibly low budgets.”35 In a prominent 9.30 p.m. slot on Friday night, it lasted an indefatigable 364 episodes, informing a generation’s experience of satellite television as a bounty of guilty pleasures.36 Presently, Tulsi is hard at work with his son, the young Deepak Ramsay, trying to conjure a horror hit. When we first met in his Oshiwara apartment in Mumbai, Tulsi unabash-edly showed me DVDs he had procured while in Hong Kong—copies of horror films from which he doubtlessly hopes to be inspired. Tulsi has several shelves stacked high with the newest horror films from around the world. He pulled out a copy of the Japanese Apartment 1303 (Ataru Oikawa, 2007) and said enigmatically: “Ye buhut acchi hai...is pe abhi mehnet karna hai” (This is very good...I have to work on this now) (Ramsay, 2009). He also told me he was scheduling shoots for a possible film called Hotel, which was not to be confused with their own Hotel from 1981; “Abhi I’m only telling you, kisi ko bhi pata nahi hai” (Right now, I’m only telling you; no one knows) (Ramsay, T., 2010). At the rate at which things are going for the former first family of horror, no one will probably ever know about Hotel. A planned collaboration with Ram Gopal Varma fell through a few years back; financing has since become a problem area for Shyam and Tulsi. In 2007, the duo produced Ghutan, a “slick” remake of Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche; it bombed. “Dekho shaayad mera kaam phir se agle maheenay se accha ho jaye, but in sab ki tara [Reliance, BIG Pictures, Precept], we cant do marketing” (Lets see, maybe work will pick up

Image 5. Shutters Down? The Ramsay Brothers’ Office on Lamington Road, Mumbai, 2010

Source: Photo taken by author, August 2009.



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again next month, but we can’t compete with the ways in which these corporations do marketing) (Ibid.) Apartment 1303, the Japanese film Tulsi was talking about when I visited him, has since been remade by Reliance BIG Pictures as 13B (Vikram Kumar, 2009). The shadow of the “Ramsay Brothers” looms so large that even the men themselves are today struggling to escape it, having to stage a “comeback” in the genre they had once pioneered (Image 5).

Notes

1. Host to some of Mumbai’s most beloved theaters, including Minerva and Apsara, as well as the run-down Naaz, Lamington Road has been a nerve center of the Bombay film industry for decades. In 1975, Minerva hosted the premiere of Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay. The Naaz Cinema building also houses the offices of several film and television production companies.

2. “Whereas in 1963, 13 per cent of all Indian films were made by ‘studio-owner producers’, 41 per cent by ‘regular producers’, and 46 per cent by ‘other than regular’ or ad hoc producers, by 1965, ‘regular producers’ were responsible for no more than 23 per cent of all Indian films, with ‘studio-owners’ and ad hoc producers accounting for 19 and 58 per cent respectively of all cinema production.” (Vitali, 2008, p. 134).

3. Writing Shantaram’s Padosi (1941) and directing Guru Dutt’s debut Lakhrani (1945), Bedekar also directed melodramas for Baburao Pendharkar’s New Movietone; “Most of his literary and filmic work recasts stere-otypes of pre-WW1 Marathi social reform novels into the declamatory style of prose melodrama with increas-ingly complex storylines” (Willemen and Rajadhyaksha, 2004, p. 56). Bedekar received the Sahitya Akademi award for his autobiographical Ek Jhad Ani Don Pakshi (1985).

4. This division of labor was very likely tentative, explaining Tulsi Ramsay’s repeated use of the indistinct collec-tive “we” to describe the family’s efforts. For example, Kiran Ramsay directed Shaitani Ilaka (1989) instead of the usual duo of Shyam and Tulsi.

5. See Denis Meikle (2009), who describes the Hammer films as consisting of “castles and crypts, of blushing virgins and blood-lusting vampires, of fanatical scientists and rapacious aristocrats, of ascetic savants, and of vengeful spirits from beyond the grave” (Meikle, 2009, p. xiii).

6. In conversation with Ranjani Mazumdar. 10 October 2009, New Delhi. 7. Launched in 1967, Vividh Bharti was a commercial channel on All-India Radio, initially with markets in

Bombay, Pune, and Nagpur. In the 1970s, it became “the dominant publicity medium for cinema, with, eg., sponsored serials and song compilation programmes” (Willemen and Rajadhyaksha, 2004, p. 25). Sheel Kumar was employed with the radio advertising firm of D.S. Mittal and Sons.

8. “Silver Jubilee” is the industry term used to refer to a film’s continuous exhibition at a theater for 25 weeks from the week of release. For a discussion of the ‘multi-starrer’ phenomenon, see Beheroze Gandhy and Rosie Thomas in Christine Gledhill Ed. Stardom: An Industry of Desire (1991).

9. This procession included, among others, Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1975), Trishul (Yash Chopra, 1978), Don (Nariman Irani, 1978), Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Prakash Mehra, 1978), Namak Halaal (Prakash Mehra, 1982), and Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983).

10. Film Information is a long-running, Mumbai-based trade journal founded and run by the Nahta family. Since its early issues, which marked the huge success of Raj Kapoor’s Bobby (1974), it has moved from its office in the Naaz Cinema building to an office in Bandra.

11. The designation of venues as “A”, “B”, “C”, and “D” centers is at best a broadly held and unwritten system of classification, sometimes used as an alternative to the concept of trade “circuits”, which in India can number anywhere between 12 to 18 (depending on who you ask). Komal Nahta explains that territories are desig-nated based on population and around “municipalities”, making Baroda an “A” center, Ratlam a “B” center, Wai a “C” center, and so on; the remote obscurity of some B and C centers, he added, makes the levying of entertainment taxes difficult (Nahta, 2009).



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12. Nagaich established himself with Farz (1967), helping to launch the careers of Jeetendra and Babita. Later hits include Mere Jeevan Saathi (1972) and Jadu Tona (1977). Kohli is known for helming two huge horror/fantasy films: Nagin (1976) and Jaani Dushman (1978).

13. When a piece published in the Times of India suggested that Bombay’s horror films catered primarily to the “lower classes,” reader M.P. John countered what he perceived as “cynicism,” asserting that “People from all ranks of society patronize horror films...as an antidote to tension which is rampant in city life” (Times of India, May 12, 1978).

14. “Foreign Films in Bombay” lists The Omen entering its second week at a full-house Sterling, and The Exorcist at the end of a leggy 14-week run.

15. As Ravi Sundaram argues, with “unending waves of new technological objects entering markets, homes, and offices”, piracy came to participate in the “publicly perceived sphere of the new world of things” (2010, p. 106). This new “world of things” extended over a seemingly infinite range of mass-market commodities, but piracy’s presence was perhaps most keenly felt where media goods were concerned. Software and hardware, music and movies “took on a life as counterfeits, fakes or copies” (2010, p. 106).

16. The same piece quotes Manmohan Desai warning that piracy is “not even like cancer, it’s like AIDS. It cannot be cured” (Sayani and Ahmed, 1986, p. 50).

17. “Logon ko buhut mazaa aaya, but difficulty ye thi ki you know na Bombay ki public kaisi hai. Woh 3D glasses maar kar ghar ley jaatei the. Plus silver screen lagana padta tha and projection lens bhi change karna padta tha…Small centers mein difficult tha” (“The people really enjoyed it, but the difficulty with the Bombay audi-ences was that they would take the 3D glasses home. We also had to change the lens and and put in place a ‘silver screen’, which made it difficult to exhibit in small centers”) (Ramsay, 2009).

18. Advertising tagline for the film cited in Willemen and Rajadhyaksha, 2004, p. 217.19. The “video nasties” campaign in England was a crusade against graphic American slasher films and continental

horror—prominently, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980)—dangerously circulating in the U.K. on videotape. Spearhead by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now Mediawatch-UK), the campaign led to the Video Recordings Act of 1984.

20. “With September 19 [1932] set as the release date, the Beckenham Council [the “newest ‘busybody’ organi-zation”] leapt into action on September 6, banning children from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ‘even if the BBFC [British Board of Film Certification] does not’, and insisting that all local advertising proclaim ‘not suita-ble for children’...Further ‘OBJECTIONS TO DR. JEKYLL’ were headlined by the Kinematograph Weekly (September 9) as other local watch groups fell in behind Beckenham. Typically, the picture was shown without restrictions in both Croydon and in Bromley, while nearby communities issued bans. On October 11, an attempt made in Belfast by religious groups to ban Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde outright was overruled, as the film avoided the onslaught of abuse endured by [James Whale’s 1931 film] Frankenstein” (Johnson, 1997: 59).

21. “I wonder what made the censors hack the film like this. Did they think the picture would frighten the audi-ence? Yet in our daily life we do see accidents and cyclones and they can be more horrible than the scenes in the movie. And has it landed us in hospitals or lunatic asylums?” (Janardhanan, 1978).

22. “Is There a Double Standard as the Industry Alleges?” in Star & Style, September 1987 (cited in Mehta, Monika. “Selections: Cutting, Classifying and Certifying in Bombay Cinema”, Unpublished Thesis. August 2001. Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota. Microform 3017926).

23. “What emerges is a hierarchy in which sexual scenes in the films of respected and powerful producers were characterized as aesthetically pleasing, but the same scenes in other films were denounced as vulgar and obscene” (Mehta, 2001, p. 40).

24. Besides the “casual and informal atmosphere” presiding over censorship meetings [“The members munched on the biscuits, took periodic bathroom breaks and made occasional notes” (2001, p. 92)], Monika Mehta learns from directors and officials of “the ways in which censorship was circumvented”…



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I found that “illegal” activities such as bribing state officials, making two sets of negatives instead of one, exhibiting fake certificates, screening objectionable scenes in small towns and run-down theaters, and passing copies of uncertified films or films which contain “objectionable” scenes through the customs for exhibition abroad were the means by which the film industry negotiated with or evaded state authority. From my conversations with officials at the Central Board of Certification, I learned that producers and directors would offer them gifts ranging from cassette tapes to hits in gold bowls as tokens of their respect and/or appreciation. They said that they would promptly return them, but they named a few of their colleagues who had accepted such gifts. (Mehta, 2001, p. 102)

25. It might be noted that as a policy, the CBFC destroys all auxiliary documents pertaining to the censorship of a film five years after the certification has occurred (unless special circumstances—like a court case—intervene). “We don’t keep them…We are not an archive…We don’t have the space” (Azad, 2010).

26. The doctor could not be represented as a psychiatrist, one supposes, in the same way that the film had to be framed as “only entertainment.”

27. While Jai Santoshi Maa “[started] life as a routine B-picture, the film made history by becoming one of the biggest hits of the year...and made a little known mother goddess into one of the most popular icons” (Willemen and Rajadhyaksha, 2004, p. 424).

28. See Geeta Kapur for an exploration of Shahani’s “sublimation of material culture history to the pure cinematic time of now” as an avant garde gesture (2000, p. 358). Rajadhyaksha marks 1971 as commemorating an “explicitly avant garde” turn with Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta productions, Ritwik Ghatak’s last epics, and Mani Kaul’s first films (Kapur, 2009, p. 233).

29. Filmfare, January 1–15 1985, 62–63.30. In his 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), the critic Clement Greenberg attempted a theory of cul-

tural production that could account for the co-existence of wildly disparate art-objects—an Eliot poem and a Tin Pan Alley song, for example—that are nonetheless on the same “order” of culture. Greenberg famously concluded that there was a “rearguard” of culture sustaining itself on the failure of the avant garde to fulfill the needs of the urban masses. The recently arrived country bumpkin or the petty bourgeois, lacking the capacity to enjoy authentic culture, was beset with boredom. Not for him the Picassos and Michelangelos; without the time, patience, and energy to learn to appreciate true art, the “crowd” demanded instant gratification. It was under these circumstances that kitsch, spurred by rising literacy and technological saturation, was to establish itself as the culture of choice for the Industrial West’s unwashed many.

31. “The Popular Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles” (pp. 89–96), IIC Quarterly, Indian Popular Cinema: Myth, Meaning and Metaphor, Vol 8, No. 1, 1981. Formally trained as a psychologist and sociologist, Nandy is one of the doyens of Indian popular culture, and his intervention in the discourse around Bombay Cinema legitimized it as a form worthy of critical attention.

32. Pierre Bourdeiu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (1984, p. 57) as cited in Sconce (1995, p. 371).

33. Star of Sabse Bada Khiladi (1995), Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi (1996), Mr & Mrs Khiladi (1997), International Khiladi (1999), and Khiladi 420 (2000). When I called him in September 2009, “Keshu” (as he chooses to be known) began by saying: “I do not think that I would like to talk about this [the ‘Ramsay Brothers’] anymore...I moved on and did the Khiladi films, they were very successful.” Pleasantries were exchanged and the conversa-tion ended shortly thereafter (Telephonic conversation with Keshu Ramsay, September 2010).

34. While Indian television dates back to a 1950s state-funded initiative, commercially programed television, the way we recognize it today, only began to take shape in the early 1980s on the national broadcasting network Doordarshan. Zee TV entered the Indian television market as a part of the Star Network in 1992 during the early phase of satellite television but soon broke away, giving birth to the Zee Network.

35. In its early years, Zee TV was viewed as having “totally ruined the financial market”: “They were initially unsure of themselves, so offered only Rs 1 lakh or less to producers to make a serial, which would cost a minimum of Rs 3 lakhs on [Doordarshan] to make. But producers who’d sat at home for nearly two years were



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by then desperate enough to take up even this paltry offer. The result was inevitable. They churned out serials with shabby production values and since they could not afford established TV stars, they took new actors” (Mahadevan, 1994, p. 17).

36. “As many viewers seem to hate it, as love it—though ‘love’ perhaps isn’t quite the right word... The serial’s pro-duction values [even horror can be well-made] have been giving viewers the creeps: nonentity actors, pathetic sets and makeshift measures for costumes, locations, etc. and generally low technical values...” (Merchant, 1994, March 12–16, p. 15).

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"taste, taboo, trash: the story of the ramsay brothers"

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