Indian Cinema

I

Introduction

Indian Cinema, historical development of cinema in India. Cinema is popularly acknowledged to have been introduced to India through the famed private screenings by the Lumière Brothers at the Watson’s Hotel, Bombay, on July 7, 1896. As elsewhere, however, a variety of “pre-cinema” technologies and art forms addressing the projected moving image have subsequently been named as important precedents: the “pat” painting mural tradition present in various forms all over the country, in which an interlocutor/storyteller usually illuminates images while interpreting them in music and words (for example, the Rajasthani Pabuji-no-pad, the Maharashtrian Chitrakathi, or the animated leather puppets of Andhra Pradesh). More directly related to film technology itself, the Patwardhan Brothers’ Shambarik Kharolika (Magic Lantern) from the late 19th century in Maharashtra is one of the best-known instances of partially animated glass plates projected on to a screen.

II

The Silent Era

The film industry in India began in two very contrasting sectors. On the one hand, distribution agencies (such as Bourne & Shepherd, Calcutta, Clifton & Co., Bombay, or the Madras Photographic Stores) often extended their business in still photography to distribute both “animated photographs” and offer crews on hire to shoot tea parties, advertising films, and prominent stage plays. They were joined in this genre by films sponsored by the colonial state and the indigenous royalty, official cameramen accompanying royal entourages (a prominent event of this nature being the extensively filmed Grand Durbar of King George V in Delhi, 1911). On the other hand, the first Indian film-makers were mainly independent amateurs: Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatvadekar, who made several shorts (for example, Wrangler Mr R. P. Paranjpye’s Return to India, 1902), was one of the best known. He also extended his film-making into an independent tent-show distribution and thence into what was, in the first decade of the 20th century, one of India’s better-known businesses trading in camera equipment. Hiralal Sen started the Royal Bioscope Company (1899) on the edge of Calcutta’s thriving commercial stage, which was even then adapting to film with Amritlal Bose’s innovative programming at the Star Theatre.

The first film-maker in something like the contemporary sense was the man known as the “father of Indian Cinema”, Dhundiraj Govind (aka Dadasaheb) Phalke, who made his debut with Raja Harishchandra (1913; King Harishchandra) made in a domestic, cottage-industry studio. In 1918 he started the Hindustan Cinema Films Company at Nasik, with finance from Mayashankar Bhatt representing the first real instance of indigenous capital entering film production. Much of the early money for production, during the period 1915-1922, was an expansion of real-estate speculation entering theatre-building and thence distribution and production, notably in Punjab and western India.

In both Bombay and Calcutta there arose several studios in the 1920s, financed by former exhibitors and theatre owners. Kohinoor Film Company (established in 1918) was the largest—financed and owned by Dwarkadas Sampat who had financed other similar enterprises, including one for S. N. Patankar, another important independent distributor. Kohinoor began with a major censorship controversy when its first significant production, the mythological Bhakta Vidur (1921; St Vidur), where the saint appears clad as Gandhi, was banned for political reasons. Kohinoor nevertheless recovered to make several mega-hits in the 1920s, including Gul-e-Bakavali (The Fairy and the Flower) and Kala Naag (Black Snake) both in 1924, and was followed by a number of successful studios in Bombay (Ranjit, Sharda, and Imperial—the last known for making India’s first sound film, Alam Ara, in 1931).

III

The Studio Era

With the coming of sound, most of the existing studios either closed down or grew into larger units; Calcutta saw the coming together of talent from the silent studios—Indian Kinema, Barua Pics (especially its proprietor, one of India’s most celebrated directors, P. C. Barua), and British Dominion Films—into perhaps the foremost studio in India’s history: New Theatres (established in 1931). This studio, along with Prabhat Film Company in Pune (which had developed in 1929 from the film-making traditions of Kolhapur, pioneered by Baburao Painter’s Maratha historicals and Mahabharata mythologicals at the Maharashtra Film Company), Bombay Talkies (established in 1934), the Sagar Film Company (formed in 1930, an offshoot of Imperial Studio), and Wadia Movietone (established in 1933), were the leading lights of what has been defined as the “studio era”, the period after the coming of sound and before the start of World War II. The first southern Indian films in Tamil and Telugu were made either in Bombay or in Calcutta, but by the 1940s a flourishing studio infrastructure was established in Madras, Coimbatore, Salem, and Mysore-Bangalore.

This period of the “studio era” saw some of the biggest, most spectacular, and complex melodramas ever made in India. Many of their terms of reference were social reform literature, sagas of the nationalist movement, and “realistic” proscenium stage plays. Some of the leading figures in Indian cinema—V. Shantaram (Kunku, 1937; The Unexpected), Barua (Devdas, 1935), Debaki Bose (Vidyapati, 1937), B. N. Reddi (Swargaseema, 1945), and B. R. Panthulu (School Master, 1958)—were responsible for establishing during this period not just the “look” of Indian cinema as it is currently known, but the very terms of cultural modernity, ideologies of neo-traditionalism and of the urban middle class.

IV

Indian Cinema after Independence

With the end of World War II (and thus, of the war economy: the lifting of rationing on raw stock, and the entry of new financiers into the film industry) and the coming of Independence (1947), the Indian government introduced several nationalist state policies on the cinema. Underpinning many of these was a new post-Independence interpretation of national cinema, ascribing to the mainstream Indian cinema a specific cultural value of fostering an indigenous “national integration”. Indeed, large numbers of the population outside the Hindi belt found contact with the “national” language through the cinema, and the Hindi cinema norms themselves were duplicated in Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam language industries. However, the birth of an independent cinema movement in the 1950s—the best-known example being the Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray: Pather Panchali (1955; Song of the Little Road); Aparajito (1956; The Unvanquished); Apur Sansar (1959; The World of Apu)—also led to several changes in the norm within the mainstream industry itself. Driven by an explicitly post-national disaffiliation from the sentiments of belonging and community, much of this cinema introduced the notion of heroism in the character of the outsider, the rebel, the one who renounces society, as seen, for example, in the work of Raj Kapoor (Shri 420, 1955; Mr 420), Guru Dutt (Pyaasa, 1957; Eternal Thirst), and Mehboob Khan (Mother India, 1957).

Sequences such as the corrupt land scheme in Shri 420, scripted by the radical playwright K. A. Abbas, the poet who is believed dead and posthumously praised in Pyaasa, or, most spectacularly, the mother who fertilizes the soil with her rebel son’s blood in Mother India are now legendary in India. Many such scenes have to be perceived in terms of the contradictions posed by “traditional” values and a booming industry of mass culture, the rise of independent speculators and financiers, and their most obvious commodity: the star system. Stars of the Hindi cinema such as Dilip Kumar, Nargis, and Dev Anand were part of a large group covering many regional languages: Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen in Bengali, Rajkumar and Kalpana in Kannada, Prem Nazir, Sathyan, and Madhu in Malayalam, and (future politicians and chief ministers) M. G. Ramachandran and N. T. Rama Rao in Tamil and Telugu respectively. These stars were only the most visible elements in a major technological and narrative standardization of the “All-India Film” idiom, premised on the songs and the audio industry, composers, and lyric writers in every language, and a system of visual and dialogue recording that have come to be characteristic of the “Indian” or “Masala” or “Bollywood” cinema.

In the late 1960s, with a series of agrarian, industrial, and other movements threatening the stability of the government of Indira Gandhi, came the “New Indian Cinema” movement. It was set in motion with a small, unsecured loan from the Film Finance Corporation (now the National Film Development Corporation) to Mrinal Sen, for making Bhuvan Shome (1969), his first film in Hindi. A contemporary of Ray, and Ritwik Ghatak, Sen was already an established director of serious cinema, but Bhuvan Shome, reaching a much larger audience, brought him national recognition.

The initiative for funding independent art films came from the government, and the movement in turn validated the substantial ancestry in the films of Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960; The Cloud-Capped Star), a maverick director whose genius went unrecognized in his lifetime. Ghatak’s legacy is evident in many of the films that pioneered the New Cinema movement: Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (1969; Daily Bread), a shocking departure from the narrative and the familiar; Kumar Shahani’s radical Maya Darpan (1972; Mirror of Illusion), the Indian cinema’s first consistently formalist experiment; and Ketan Mehta’s folk-theatre-derived tale of social injustice, Bhavni Bhavai (1980; A Folk Tale). The films of this period were often politically strident, their locale mostly rural or small town India, as in the works of Shyam Benegal (Ankur, 1973; The Seedling), Girish Karnad (Kaadu, 1973; The Forest), Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Kodiyettam, 1977; The Ascent) and G. Aravindan (Uttarayanam, 1974; The Throne of Capricorn).