Question
Are Bollywood movies intentionally campy?
Answer
Your overall question is too complex to answer on Quora, but I'll respond to the example of the "Golimaar" video. In that case, the camp factor is unintended. Believe it. Any evident humor is just ordinary sitcom style humor within the plot of the movie, not a parody-reference to the MJ original.
Even if you don't know the language, I am guessing you can tell that the mondegreen subtitle lyrics have nothing to do with the actual ones. I don't speak Telugu (and haven't watched this particular movie), but recognize just enough of the words to recognize that there is no campy intent. No offense to my compatriots, but Indian cinema has only recently learned the art of true "intended camp" through recent movies like Munnabhai, MBBS.
This song sequence is actually very characteristic of a whole generation of overwrought melodramas from the 80s, that typically wove complicated drama, romance, thriller and action and humor subplots into the same movie. I haven't seen this particular movie, but I am guessing it belongs in that group.
Any humor in them was mostly slapstick, not ironic. I am mostly familiar with the Hindi ones (though I've watched a few Telugu movies from that era), but the aesthetic (if it can be called that -- it was more of a calculated pandering to certain provincial tastes) was pan-Indian.
The movies were marked by a kind of seriousness designed to appeal to the unreconstructed traditional-family-values ethos of the provincial lower middle class and poor markets, that typically did not (and still do not) understand enough English to react to Western culture in any but the most rudimentary ways.
Song-and-dance were thrown in as a bit of variety entertainment randomly (Indian cinema integrates song-and-dance in multiple ways, not a single way), and in this particular class of movies, drawing inspiration from the latest Western music and dance was the norm. Movies in the 50s-70s had made a lot more use of traditional music and dance (think of this category of movie as a replacement for the folk-theater market), but by the 80s, the audiences had tired of the traditional stuff and Western culture was a cheap place to source novelty.
If you knew nothing about America except for Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson (a fair description of the non-English speaking masses of India in the 80s), you might respond this way. Imagine watching the original MJ video with that level of awareness of Western culture. If you did not understand the lyrics of the original, or the context of Michael Jackson's rise in American pop culture, all that would get through to you would be the great choreography and overall "death and graveyards" ambience of the original. And that's what you'd copy into an unrelated context. When MJ got popular around the world in the early 80s, homeless kids on the streets in India were copying his moves, thanks to a whole bunch of good and bad ripoff dances in movies.
Movies like this are campy at two levels. Using "failed seriousness" as the definition of "camp," these movies fail in their "seriousness" differently for Indians vs. non-Indians.
For Indians, the failure is of the fully-realized intentions behind the whole 80s-melodrama genre, and the increasing social irrelevance of the markets it catered to. Except for very young children or sentimental and simple old women living sheltered lives in the provinces, nobody took the movies seriously. There is even enough cruelty in the contempt for these movies that the reaction among people like me should probably be called "malicious enjoyment" rather than "campy enjoyment."
Laughing at these movies was basically like laughing (rather cruelly) at those uncomprehending lost ones left behind by modernity and those who earnestly catered to their tastes (while some of such movie making was cynical pandering, some of it was actually created with earnestly artistic intentions). When my friends and I laughed at such things in the 80s, we were essentially laughing at our poor older relatives in the smaller, more backward towns.
For non-Indians (Americans in particular), the camp factor (I suspect), lies primarily in the shoddy production values and the clumsy and dated imitation of American styles. i.e. the same reasons Americans laugh at Japanese singing English songs at Karaoke bars. Some of this is simply a time lag. By the time Travolta-style pointy-fingered dancing could influence Indian movies, that style was already being enjoyed as camp by Americans themselves.
The main point of overlap between the two levels of camp is in the judgment of clothing, hairstyles, mannerisms etc., since non-Indians don't know the languages or enough about the contexts to truly form any sort of critical judgment of the genre of storytelling itself.
Indian tastes traditionally run to bright colors and bold patterns, which work well for traditional Indian clothes like saris. When that aesthetic is spliced together with Western clothes, you get a thoroughly garish look.
This happens because Indians like the practicality and cut of Western clothes, but often can't let go their preference for bold colors/patterns. Those who can adopt Western clothes and styles without any "localization" are relatively safe from ridicule, as are the ones who stick to traditional clothes and styles with no attempts to adopt Western traditions (my grandparents were in this category). The ones who do the splicing, especially with a poor understanding of quality in the Western bit of the DNA, are the ones who get into trouble.
That's a longer story, but the class of Indians that opts for this awful sartorial compromise is typically the same class that enjoys the 2-level campy movies in an unaffected way. In Bombay for instance, this class is known as "tapori." At a national level, Telugu-speakers from Andhra, rich Gujaratis and nouveau-rich Punjabis from around Delhi are particularly known (and made fun of) for exhibiting such "tapori" tastes (though the word is specific to Bombay).
If this explanation is too long/complex for you, the closest analogy within American culture is redneck culture that isn't intended to be funny (like the Dirty Harry movies... gun-toting vigilantism as a serious attitude, and enjoyed as such by a certain class, as opposed to Will Ferrell in Taladega Nights).
Even if you don't know the language, I am guessing you can tell that the mondegreen subtitle lyrics have nothing to do with the actual ones. I don't speak Telugu (and haven't watched this particular movie), but recognize just enough of the words to recognize that there is no campy intent. No offense to my compatriots, but Indian cinema has only recently learned the art of true "intended camp" through recent movies like Munnabhai, MBBS.
This song sequence is actually very characteristic of a whole generation of overwrought melodramas from the 80s, that typically wove complicated drama, romance, thriller and action and humor subplots into the same movie. I haven't seen this particular movie, but I am guessing it belongs in that group.
Any humor in them was mostly slapstick, not ironic. I am mostly familiar with the Hindi ones (though I've watched a few Telugu movies from that era), but the aesthetic (if it can be called that -- it was more of a calculated pandering to certain provincial tastes) was pan-Indian.
The movies were marked by a kind of seriousness designed to appeal to the unreconstructed traditional-family-values ethos of the provincial lower middle class and poor markets, that typically did not (and still do not) understand enough English to react to Western culture in any but the most rudimentary ways.
Song-and-dance were thrown in as a bit of variety entertainment randomly (Indian cinema integrates song-and-dance in multiple ways, not a single way), and in this particular class of movies, drawing inspiration from the latest Western music and dance was the norm. Movies in the 50s-70s had made a lot more use of traditional music and dance (think of this category of movie as a replacement for the folk-theater market), but by the 80s, the audiences had tired of the traditional stuff and Western culture was a cheap place to source novelty.
If you knew nothing about America except for Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson (a fair description of the non-English speaking masses of India in the 80s), you might respond this way. Imagine watching the original MJ video with that level of awareness of Western culture. If you did not understand the lyrics of the original, or the context of Michael Jackson's rise in American pop culture, all that would get through to you would be the great choreography and overall "death and graveyards" ambience of the original. And that's what you'd copy into an unrelated context. When MJ got popular around the world in the early 80s, homeless kids on the streets in India were copying his moves, thanks to a whole bunch of good and bad ripoff dances in movies.
Movies like this are campy at two levels. Using "failed seriousness" as the definition of "camp," these movies fail in their "seriousness" differently for Indians vs. non-Indians.
For Indians, the failure is of the fully-realized intentions behind the whole 80s-melodrama genre, and the increasing social irrelevance of the markets it catered to. Except for very young children or sentimental and simple old women living sheltered lives in the provinces, nobody took the movies seriously. There is even enough cruelty in the contempt for these movies that the reaction among people like me should probably be called "malicious enjoyment" rather than "campy enjoyment."
Laughing at these movies was basically like laughing (rather cruelly) at those uncomprehending lost ones left behind by modernity and those who earnestly catered to their tastes (while some of such movie making was cynical pandering, some of it was actually created with earnestly artistic intentions). When my friends and I laughed at such things in the 80s, we were essentially laughing at our poor older relatives in the smaller, more backward towns.
For non-Indians (Americans in particular), the camp factor (I suspect), lies primarily in the shoddy production values and the clumsy and dated imitation of American styles. i.e. the same reasons Americans laugh at Japanese singing English songs at Karaoke bars. Some of this is simply a time lag. By the time Travolta-style pointy-fingered dancing could influence Indian movies, that style was already being enjoyed as camp by Americans themselves.
The main point of overlap between the two levels of camp is in the judgment of clothing, hairstyles, mannerisms etc., since non-Indians don't know the languages or enough about the contexts to truly form any sort of critical judgment of the genre of storytelling itself.
Indian tastes traditionally run to bright colors and bold patterns, which work well for traditional Indian clothes like saris. When that aesthetic is spliced together with Western clothes, you get a thoroughly garish look.
This happens because Indians like the practicality and cut of Western clothes, but often can't let go their preference for bold colors/patterns. Those who can adopt Western clothes and styles without any "localization" are relatively safe from ridicule, as are the ones who stick to traditional clothes and styles with no attempts to adopt Western traditions (my grandparents were in this category). The ones who do the splicing, especially with a poor understanding of quality in the Western bit of the DNA, are the ones who get into trouble.
That's a longer story, but the class of Indians that opts for this awful sartorial compromise is typically the same class that enjoys the 2-level campy movies in an unaffected way. In Bombay for instance, this class is known as "tapori." At a national level, Telugu-speakers from Andhra, rich Gujaratis and nouveau-rich Punjabis from around Delhi are particularly known (and made fun of) for exhibiting such "tapori" tastes (though the word is specific to Bombay).
If this explanation is too long/complex for you, the closest analogy within American culture is redneck culture that isn't intended to be funny (like the Dirty Harry movies... gun-toting vigilantism as a serious attitude, and enjoyed as such by a certain class, as opposed to Will Ferrell in Taladega Nights).