Kamal Ghorui
For a certain generation, magazines held a magic that is difficult to imagine now. It was the closest we had to the idea of holding a world in our hands. The world depicted in the magazines was different from ours, yet not too far removed. It was a form of travel before travel became a pursuit.
While there were many magazines that tickled our fancy, none came close to the power exerted on our imaginations as Stardust. It marked a moment in India when magazines crossed a significant threshold. Before Stardust, India had desire but not appetite. It had wonder, but not knowingness. Stardust made us less naïve and more worldly.
Desire, at that time, made a guest appearance in our lives. It peeked out awkwardly, largely in cinema, but shied away, more often than not, in naming itself. It lurked in metaphors, and hid behind poetic flourish. Desire of this kind aims at culmination. Once arrived, it extinguishes itself. It is not hungry; it is devotional.
Appetite is a different creature. It does not seek fulfilment. It seeks to be fed constantly. And feeding it does not lead to quenching; on the contrary, it is reawakened by it. And it was appetite — not desire — that India did not yet know how to produce, package, and sell till Stardust, launched in 1971, under the feisty and fearless tutelage of a young Shobhaa De (then Rajadhyaksha), taught it how. This was not simply a new film magazine. It was a new relationship between the public and the famous, built on a commercial logic that India had not yet made explicit.
Filmfare had been in the business of stars since 1952. But Filmfare and Stardust were not doing the same thing at different intensities. They were doing categorically different things to the reader’s interiority.
For Filmfare, stars were those you looked up to as occupants of a rarefied space. They were distant celestial objects, faintly sacred in nature. The relationship was locked in a single direction – upwards. What the star exuded, the reader received. What was at work was devotion – from the temple to the screen.
Stardust sold stars as objects, shiny objects but objects nonetheless. And their role was to build appetite. And appetite, unlike admiration, requires a degree of proximity, of earthliness. Consuming something you revere is not easy. And to make stars objects of consumption, you must first make them pliable – subject to your whims, dependent on your interest. They must shine, but they must also be made easy to grasp, to handle, and to toss away if need be.
Stardust achieved this through a precise mechanism: it degraded the sheen of the stars even as it made them more delicious to consume. They were made spicier, juicier, and more interesting than what they perhaps deserved to be. Everything Stardust did was to this script: Neeta’s Natter, the inspired use of Hinglish, the blind Naughty Awards, the coining of labels to describe stars- Sexy Sanyasi (Vinod Khanna), Virar ka Chhokra (Govinda), The Phenomenon (Rajesh Khanna), who if memory serves became the Ex-Phenomenon– none of this was incidental. It was the operational logic. Pull the star off the pedestal, not to humanise them, but to make them fun to consume. A deity cannot be a commodity. Stardust converted deities into products.
The use of language is particularly noteworthy. We swear more easily and profusely in the vernacular, and nothing cuts to the chase more than Bambaiya Hindi. It is a makeshift version that works meaning backwards – words sound like what they should mean. It was the surest way of descent – of bringing down the aura surrounding the stars from a halo to the arc light.
And Stardust did not merely commodify stars. It turned the reader’s desire into a commodity. Filmfare sold you the star. Stardust told you that the star was ownable – every individual could construct their own version of the star as they saw fit. Desire here became both reproducible and insatiable. And this was enabled by packaging the stars anew. Slice them into a bite-sized collage of characteristics, utterances and actions, and feast on them, aided by a liberal dash of masala.
This was not entirely new. India had got a sense of the hot breath of frank desire in the form of Shammi Kapoor, whose body said things the tongue dared not utter. The delights of the cabaret allowed us to partake of some excesses but under a tightly reined framework of punishment and moral consequence. Ameen Sayani’s voice broke through the paternal cadence of broadcast to acknowledge that popular music could be placed on a perishable consumption ladder. Khushwant’s Singh’s naughtiness injected into Illustrated Weekly a note of guilty pleasure.
But these were timid rehearsals. Desire was still by and large tamed and kept under a vigilant eye. Desire was always fraught with consequences, and the vamp either died or was redeemed with a white sari.
Stardust rode roughshod over this veneer. It did something no other cultural product had done before – it took the consumer seriously. It was not interested in improving the citizen but in serving their appetite and ensuring that it was never fully satisfied.
This prefigured the shift that was to take place twenty years later, when consumption became the engine of the economy. But it was Stardust that sowed its seeds. Consumer culture is not constructed on the back of the availability of goods but on seeing the act of consumption as the vital engine of life. When want precedes need, when spice dwarfs substantiveness, it is then that consumption becomes a self-renewing instrument.
India crossed that line not in 1991 but in 1971, in a glossy magazine with Hinglish headlines and a worldly irreverence wholly ahead of its times. In a black-and-white India, Stardust was colour. Lurid, unashamed, and, as it turned out, prophetic.
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