Bunty and Babli couldn’t have got it more right. The Hindi film industry is on a small-town adventure. The box office is humming with community-arranged marriages, romances, elopements, laadli but rebellious daughters whose adoring fathers eventually come around, big city ambition, unemployment, MSME dreams and more—not in the cafés and bars of Mumbai and certainly not in the Cuba and Turkey of Ek Tha Tiger.
The story of Bala, starring a prematurely balding Balmukund ‘Bala’ (Ayushmann Khurrana) who pines for the fair-skinned Shruti (Yami Gautam), unfolds in Kanpur.
Last year’s Batti Gul Meter Chalu starring a love triangle of SK (Shahid Kapoor), Nauti (Shraddha Kapoor) and Tripathi (Divyendu Sharma) was shot in Tehri, a small town in Uttarakhand.
In Manmarziyaan, Abhishek Bachchan, Vicky Kaushal and Taapsee Pannu do their stuff in Amritsar. Directors, scriptwriters, choreographers and the usual accoutrements of talent in Indian cinema are revelling in the heartthrobs of Dimapur over Delhi.
Why this sudden switch to Bijnor from Bombay?
Prakash Jha, award-winning director, says, “I love shooting in Bhopal. I rather shoot there than erect a set in Film City in Mumbai. People there are very co-operative.”
Idyllic European getaways have given way to stories set in Lucknow, Kanpur, Mathura, Agra and Patna. Even big banners such as Yash Raj Films and Dharma Productions adapted and went local with films such as Shuddh Desi Romance and Dum Laga Ke Haisha, and Badrinath ki Dulhaniya and Dhadak. NRIs too love such films.
They, and even Bollywood-obsessed foreigners get to see cinematically unexplored small-town India, say filmmakers. According to Shyam Benegal, “The audience connects more to such movies because their heart lies there.”
Audiences remember and agree. Urban India is a city of memories, culled from the ebb and flow of suburbia, innumerable small towns and provincial burgs that are plugged into the millennial way of life.
Many NRIs are from small towns, who migrated for a better, westernised life. Nostalgia is important to keep identity alive in an alien milieu. A massive inflow of townies has come to cities, even as cities go to them offering new lifestyles and appetites.
Where there were a few dhabas and bakeries a decade ago, now there are drive-in restaurants and afternoon discos in small towns such as Kotdwar. Florists selling roses on Valentine’s Day in Yercaud and salons offering facials and hair spas in Shillong. Concerns and careers have changed in small town India and are reflected in the movies. Dream Girl (2019) has little to do with Hema Malini’s 1977 film; this time it is the versatile Ayushmann again playing a cross-gender voice artist in Mathura who works in a girls-only call centre to help out his EMI-ridden father. Nauti, the heroine of Batti Gul Meter Chalu, is a fashion designer.
Contemporary issues matter and this new film genre blows open the lid of conservative incomprehension in small towns reflected in surveys that said women are unhappy the most in live-in relationships: in Luka Chuppi, set in Mathura, it is Rashmi (Kriti Sanon) who persuades her swain Vinod ‘Guddu’ (Kartik Aaryan) to stay together to know each other better before marriage; she is incidentally the daughter of politician Vishnu Trivedi who wants a ban on live-in relationships. Raghu, played by Sushant Singh Rajput in Aditya Chopra’s Shuddh Desi Romance is in a live-in relationship with Parineeti Chopra’s Gayatri—in Jaipur. For ‘Gen Small Town’ living in big cities, watching such films is like going home—but on the screen. The 2011 Census defines Tier II towns as those with a population of 50,000-99,999, while Tier III and Tier IV towns have populations of 20,000-49,999 and 10,000-19,999, respectively.
Almost two decades down the line, these numbers have grown exponentially and the film industry realises that. So, in a reversal-of-sorts, the industry has decided to place Karan Johar and his show-sha a step behind as it hunts for stories to connect with these cities.
A trade analyst thinks that townie movies make it big because the audience immediately plugs into their small town plots and subplots. He says, “A paradigm shift has happened to stories and locales in films now. The audience is responsible for it.”
These films have a pan-India connect. Most people in our country do not live in palaces; they are looking at the ground reality and issues that they face on a day-to-day basis.
They see a young Haridwar video cassette shopowner and sexually confused RSS pracharak Prem Prakash Tiwari (Ayushmann), who marries overweight Sandhya (Bhumi Pednekar, who put on the extra kilos for the shoot), in Dum Laga Ke Haisha because he cannot get a girl with ‘Juhi Chawla looks’—and identify with the characters immediately.
The change is that while films such as Ankur, Arth, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Mirch Masala were enjoyed by critics and their audiences alike, the cash registers relatively stayed quiet. Now, Super 30, Dream Girl, Luka Chuppi, Article 15 are box office triumphs.
The common factor in all these films? They are set in small-town or rural India. Not the rural India of Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, but of Akshay Kumar’s Pad Man or Kiran Rao’s Peepli Live.
MC Bobby, representative of the Film Exhibitors United Organisation of Kerala, says, “Films don’t do well unless they have strong content. Today you can find proper equipped theatres in villages too.”
It is not that Bollywood has discovered a new formula, it has simply reinvented an old one. Success with the girl and failure with a moral is the Bollywood leitmotif of migration to the big city—usually in the ‘Bombaiyya’ of the ’60s and the ’70s.
Amitabh Bachchan was memorable in Deewaar as the small boy who becomes a feared smuggler, only to meet a tragic end. Dharmendra in Yaadon ki Baaraat is driven away from the small town of his birth and discovers his lost brothers with a song.
Today, the experience is not so farcical, though the townie idiom was popularised by actors as varied as Rajesh Khanna in Anand to Aamir Khan in Raja Hindustani.
We are seeing a cultural revolution of sorts in tinsel town. Actors are by habit very image-conscious and choosy about roles that perpetuate the action hero, the with-it city boy or the giggly girl who finds a beau at OTT sangeets.
Townies were usually second or third-lead characters. Not any more. Chandigarh boy Ayushmann is the posterboy of small-town India in Bollywood, comfortable in his role as Nakul Kaushik of Meerut, Gurgaon marketing executive Mudit Sharma in Shubh Mangal Saavdhan or Karthik Singh in the upcoming Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, which looks at homosexuality.
Bollywood’s financial standards have climbed faster than Sunidhi Chauhan’s Billboard ratings but the gamble pays off each time.
Films that would not have lasted beyond the first couple of days in start-of-the-millennium India —where smartphones were a luxury and a Thailand package tour was exotic—are blockbusters.
Indian small-town society has opened up, in spite of prevailing political conservatism. Previously taboo topics such as middle-age romance, erectile dysfunction, LGBTQ relationships and sex life of parents are grist for the mill for filmmakers who figure that the audience they had once considered prudish has matured.
The new script reports the inhibitions and heartbreaks of contemporary small-town India; Ashwini Iyer, who directed Bareilly ki Barfi, says, “I belong to a small town and love to set my films in small towns. All storytellers try to bring a personal touch to their work. Small towns have charming quirks that are not to be found in big cities.”
City purchasing power is peaking after the economic slowdown that began two years ago. The marketing industry in search of new patrons has joined the Bollywood bandwagon headed to fresh pastures.
According to a 2018 FICCI-EY report on India’s media and entertainment sector, there were 9,710 single-screen cinemas with 91 per cent share of total screens in 2009.
The share came down to less than 71 per cent in 2017 with 6,780 screens. At the same time, multiplexes have grown at a steady rate of over 10 per cent. A senior corporate executive of India’s largest cinema exhibition chain PVR Cinemas predicts an exponential rise in multiplexes in Tier II and Tier III cities.
The group recently launched PVR Utsav—a multiplex offering for towns with populations between 3-5 lakh.
The Carnival Group is also eyeing smaller towns. It plans to develop affordable ‘community entertainment centres’ under its brand Jalsa Talkies.
India’s current multiplex screen count is around 3,000, averaging about five-six screens per theatre. In a country of one billion-plus, this number seems inadequate. Producer and distributor Manjunath Gowda says, “Though revenue comes in from single screens in small towns, these theatres need to be upgraded. Presently, they only cater to middle and lower-middle class.”
Operators across the board plan to add 7,000 screens over the next 10 years to cover 70 per cent of the country. Most of these would be in smaller towns. UFO Moviez is also eyeing the rural sector with Nova Cinemaz.
Stars such as Ajay Devgn have gone on record to say that they would be investing `600 crore to set up theatres across rural India. Even the bhai of Bollywood—Salman Khan—has often voiced the need to open more multiplexes on the outskirts of cities. Needless to say, small is big and growing bigger.
Though many popular films such as Saand ki Aankh involve a countryside setting, small town-based films have brought about the decline of the rural film narrative. The small town is the social, cultural and economic bridge between India and Bharat. The countryside has begun to segue into suburbia and small towns, bringing about a value osmosis.
The small town footprint has grown in digital entertainment space, too. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hotstar, TVF, Eros, Alt Balaji and more are vying for the eyeballs and sense that the heart of India lives not in the villages where dhoti-clad Sunil Dutt was a hero but in its districts where Ayushmann and Taapsee would be the boy and girl-next-door.
The five-episode-long Kota Factory deals with the acne-spread of coaching centres. The Pankaj Tripathi-starrer Mirzapur is all about the dark underbelly of the Hindi heartland. Gullak is about the loves and lives of a middle-class family in a small town.
Director Abhishek Chaubey says, “I’m glad that we are making movies based in India for the Indian audience. We have great locales and great stories to be told. Even the urban audience enjoys these films.”
The new cinema that reflects a Brave New India has changed cinematic constituencies. In the art cinema of the 1970s, being unglamorous was the style. Amol Palekar, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Vidya Sinha played dispossessed and powerless characters in low-budget films that got critical acclaim but did not make the cash registers ring.
Those were socialist times when poverty and intellectuals were bonded by conscience. Very few of the actors such as Naseeruddin Shah could break into the big screen.
Now, the line between mainstream cinema and art films has blurred. Selling social issues at the box office creates money-spinners because the small-town audience can relate to the characters, the locale and the story; they can empathise with the travails of small-town tailor couple Mauji Sharma (Varun Dhawan) and Mamta (Anushka Sharma) who win the Raymond Fashion Fund competition for upcoming fashion designers.
Their company ‘Sui Dhaaga: Made in India’ becomes a globally successful fashion brand. Aspirational and optimistic, the conqueror is no more the village serf, but the small town worker.
Sui Dhaaga, which crossed into the Rs 100 crore league, obviously has resonated with its audience; online fashion has opened the eyes of small-town Indians, especially girls, to modern trends and styles.
Arvind Fashion is driving brand awareness and Kishore Biyani’s Future Group’s value-fashion venture will invest Rs 350 crore in 140 exclusive outlets over the next two years. It explains Nauti and Mamta perfectly.
But all is not love and pretty faces in a small-town romance. Uttar Pradesh is a favoured destination for filmmakers now with its plethora of castes, dialects, customs, cultural mores and folklore that attracts creative minds. UP has a reputation for crime and communal violence, not to mention poor employment and education—perfect script fodder for filmmakers.
In Milan Talkies anti-Romeo squads roam the streets of Allahabad, and the impotent goon leader Guru Panda (Sikandar Kher) castrates a boy who is in love with a girl from another caste.
The heartland is the location for Pati Patni Aur Woh remake starring Kartik Aaryan, Bhumi Pednekar and Ananya Panday, Gulabo Sitabo with Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann, Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, starring Janhvi Kapoor, Bala, which reunited the Dum Laga ke Haisha pair, Article 15, Jabariya Jodi and Prassthanam. Producer Dinesh Vijan’s Maddock Films, which has produced some critically acclaimed films such as Bala, Stree, Hindi Medium, Luka Chuppi and Love Aaj Kal, has been presenting quirky content set in small towns. His upcoming Arjun Patiala, Angrezi Medium, Rooh Afza, Stree 2 all have small-town settings.
“The city or the background is also a character. Most of my films have small-town stories and have been box office blockbusters. They take you back to your roots,” he says.
Director Nitin Kakkar, who explored Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kashmir through Filmistan, Mitron and Notebook respectively, agrees that the city or town plays an integral role in the film.
“People in Mumbai are different from people in Gujarat or Kashmir. Different political and financial influences make the person. I draw my characters from them,” he says.
While he has travelled across the country exploring the authenticity of characterisation, his peer Imtiaz Ali, who directed Highway in the valleys of Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir, reveals his perennial fascination of the Himalayas.
His next film that casts Kartik Aaryan and Sara Ali Khan in lead roles is set in Himachal again. Says Imtiaz, “The rough terrain, the bumpy roads, the dangerous under-constructed ghats and barren canyons have enchanted me since childhood.
"When I was younger, we used to travel by train or bus and stayed with relatives. In my films the tones of relationships change with the terrain.”
Navdeep Singh’s Laal Kaptaan may not have done well at the box office but the director who has made films such as Manorama Six Feet Under and NH 10 earlier, says, “I grew up in Kanpur and Jabalpur and always felt that our films don’t reflect places that we grew up in. We have such great locales, but we don’t get facilities to shoot in the interiors. Laal Kaptaan was shot in interiors Rajasthan in places such as Jhadol, Baneda and Rambatra, while the story is set in Bundelkhand.”
The trend is not limited to Bollywood. Tirupur Subramanian, veteran distributor in Tamil Nadu, says, “In the internet age, there is no difference between the performance of a film in cities and small towns or Tier II and Tier III cities.
If Bigil is a success in Chennai, it will be a hit all over Tamil Nadu, including small towns.
When it comes to people’s tastes, there is not much difference across the state. This gap in terms of taste has decreased since the advent of internet.
Even a person in a small village is aware of films that release in tier I centres. Big-ticket releases in other languages do have a similar reach. For the not-so-major releases in English and other regional languages there is a market gap.
However, with many Tier II and Tier III cities gradually getting multiplexes, this disparity could be a thing of the past. A place such as Trichy will have two to three multiplexes in the next few years, and that will create a market for other language films.”
With more and more multiplexes coming up in semi-urban and rural areas, ticket pricing is an art; a film cannot command a similar ticket price in Baroda as in Delhi or Chennai. K Deepak, Box office tracker and exhibitor, says, “On average, in Tier I cities such as Hyderabad, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam, a family of four spends `1,000 or more (including refreshments) to watch a film in a multiplex. However, in Tier II and III centres such as Addanki, Chirala, Tatipaka, Madanapalle and Narasapuram, people don’t have any other entertainment apart from movies, and throng the theatres at least once every week. Here, price dynamics come into play. All non-AC theatres have got a facelift and balcony tickets cost Rs 100 each.”
Art imitates life today in the small townscape, where ambition has been given hope and mores are given a cheeky wink. Take Milan Talkies set in Allahabad and directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, with Ali Fazal and newcomer Shraddha Srinath in lead roles. Ali’s Annu is a wannabe film director who has a cultural crossover moment. Big city tech met small-town life in the script when a sudden power cut plunged a theatre showing Mughal-e-Azam into darkness. What does out hero do? Get an Eveready torch? Lead a dharna at the local power station? No.
He does renditions of Dilip Kumar and Prithviraj Kapoor in the cathode glow of scores of mobile phone screens lighting up the darkness.
It’s not just actors such as Richa Chadda or Vineet Kumar who are bringing small-town comedies and tragedies to the silver screen. A star such as Akshay Kumar has made the small town film his oeuvre with stellar acting in hits such as Jolly LLB 2 playing Lucknow lawyer Jagdishwar ‘Jolly’ Mishra and Keshav in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha. Directors are applying urban Indian concerns to the cultural dichotomies of rural India. Take Toilet: Ek Prem Katha directed by Shree Narayan Singh and set around Mathura.
Keshav falls in love with educated college girl Jaya (Bhumi) and takes her to live in his village. She files for divorce after her father-in-law who had previously married Keshav to a black buffalo for luck razed their newly constructed toilet.
It is also Akshay’s most successful film by raking in an unprecedented Rs 300 crore. It is based on a similar story of Anita Narre from Madhya Pradesh—now there is reality cinema for you.
(With inputs from A Sharadhaa, Kirubhakar Purushothaman, Sajin Shrijith, Murali Krishna)