(Wrote this personal essay around a new book for Mint Lounge)
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On hearing about the recent death of media magnate Nari Hira, I was reminded of the first time I heard that name as a child (briefly thinking it designated a company rather than a person) and of the wave of “video films” that Hira produced in the mid-to-late 1980s. These were quickly made, visually unambitious movies of varying quality that were shot, edited and distributed on video, and heavily promoted in his magazines like Stardust and Society. They didn’t seem to fit any of the usual Hindi-film categories; indeed, one was unsure if they were even “cinema”. 
The longest chapter in Ishita Tiwary’s book Video Culture in India: The Analog Era provides some back-story about these films, through a process of discovery by a much younger person who hadn’t lived through the period herself. Tiwary says she had no idea such video films existed, and a few people she spoke to didn’t remember them either – details were slowly uncovered.
“It is possible to imagine that the consumption of content in the private space of one's home allowed middle-class women to become the primary spectators of these straight-to-video erotic thrillers,” she proposes. “Video made possible a new imagination of the spectator as not just male.” This might, with hindsight, seem a large claim, given how fleeting the video-film interlude was (and also that satellite TV, with much more permissive content, was just a few years away). Yet, to someone who was a child in 1986-87, it feels plausible. My mother and her friends watched some of Hira's films: I wasn’t allowed to, this being “adult” stuff, franker than mainstream Hindi cinema. But in the whispers around these video films, and in stolen glances at the tape covers, many of us kids saw exotic-seeming names (“Shingora, starring Persis Khambatta”) and heard of such plot points as a woman being involved at separate times with father and son (all this predating the arrival of The Bold and the Beautiful).
More broadly, Tiwary’s book analyses four manifestations of the video culture that changed the viewing experience for us in the early 1980s – making us participants with the illusion of some control over the media we consumed (long before new forms of control and manipulation arose in the internet and smart-phone age). The video film is one of the chapters. The others are the marriage video; the video news magazine (mainly Madhu Trehan’s Newstrack) which offered a different treatment of news compared to the state-run Doordarshan; and video as playing a part in the growth of the Osho Rajneesh cult, presenting the guru as simultaneously an accessible figure and a grand one.
In covering these uses of video technology, the book offers insights into the differences and similarities between video and glamorous big-screen cinema. Tiwary notes the “darshanic” gaze that video films afforded of Rajneesh, contrasting it with visual presentations of movie stars like Vinod Khanna, who was one of his followers. Or how the marriage video, though similar to a home movie, “also had intricate connections with Hindi cinema through its use of film songs and other representational practices”. We see how amateur wedding photographers learnt on the job, through trial and error: how to film a bride as opposed to the groom, family members or guests; how to turn up the glamour quotient with in-camera editing and lighting effects that might seem tacky to us today, but could be very exciting to a middle-class family seeing themselves in a video for the first time. Some videographers even became “directors” during a wedding ceremony, instructing participants to repeat a gesture mid-ritual for the camera.
Engaging as all this is, for me the book also provided triggers to video memories that don’t fall directly within the ambit of Tiwary’s study. Though we didn’t have a video player in our own house until I was ten, by the mid-1980s the bulk of my contemporary-film-watching was on cassettes – including pirated ones – rather than in halls. Video may have created a parallel structure to the mainstream Hindi film industry, as Tiwary points out, but for many viewers of the time the lines were very blurred: we watched larger-than-life films like Shahenshah on small screens with animated ads dancing over the action. Even after the advent of satellite TV in our home in early 1992, video played a big role in my viewing – I filled dozens of VHS cassettes with my favourite music videos, old films or TV shows.
Which means I relate to Tiwary’s point about video combining an immaterial experience with a material or physical one. The process of keeping one’s finger poised above the “Record” button, waiting to press it at just the right moment – and capture the opening seconds of a much-sought-after music video that was likely to play next on a countdown show – was thrilling; it conferred a sense of Godlike power and agency that earlier generations of viewers didn’t have. This was equally true about fast-forwarding a song while watching a film, or setting the timer recording for a TV programme (while keeping one’s fingers crossed that the power wouldn’t go). Or there was the commingled dismay and hope of lifting a cassette flap and blowing at real or imagined dust on the film, to remove “snow”. Tiwary also mentions the story (which came to her second-hand, but which we denizens of that time remember well) about the infamous interrogation scene from Basic Instinct – the uncrossing of Sharon Stone’s legs – becoming worn out on cassettes as viewers rewound, paused and replayed it. 
Other things covered here touched a chord too: memories of the video magazine Lehren, a filmic version of gossip magazines, which introduced us to the behind-the-scenes of movie production, including cheap-looking “mahurat” shots. Or Newstrack’s coverage of the anti-Mandal Commission protests, with its reminder of a nasty moment where police callously picked up and manhandled an injured young man lying on the road – and of my mother and aunt watching the screen and expressing indignation at this visual, all of us becoming briefly politicised by the starkness and immediacy of the footage.
Video Culture in India is more accessible than many other academic books, largely shorn of the echo-chamber jargon and repetitiveness that makes many such publications a slog. It could have been much better copy-edited, and there is an occasional randomness in its linking of different video cultures. But the book is valuable as both a chronicle of a particular, evanescent moment in India’s visual-media culture and as a memory-reviver for my generation, growing up in that narrow band of time between the 1970s – when films could only be seen in cinema halls – and the early 1990s, when it first began to feel like you never had to step out of the house at all.
