India has one of the oldest and largest film
industries in the world. It was in early 1913 that an Indian film
received a public screening. The film was Raja Harischandra. Its
director, Dadasaheb Phalke is now remembered through a life-time
achievement award bestowed by the film industry in his name. At that
point of time it was really hard to arrange somebody to portray the role
of females. Among the middle classes, that association of acting with
the loss of virtue, female modesty, and respectability has only recently
been put into question.
While a number of other film-makers, working in several Indian
languages, pioneered the growth and development of Indian cinema, the
studio system began to emerge in the early 1930s. Its most successful
early film was Devdas (1935), whose director, P.C. Barua also appeared
in the lead role. The Prabhat Film Company, established by V. G. Damle,
Shantaram, S. Fatehlal, and two other men in 1929, also achieved its
first success around this time. Damle and Fatehlal's Sant Tukaram
(1936), made in Marathi was the first Indian film to gain international
recognition.
The social films of V. Shantaram, more than anything else, paved the
way for an entire set of directors who took it upon themselves to
interrogate not only the institutions of marriage, dowry, and widowhood,
but the grave inequities created by caste and class distinctions. Some
of the social problems received their most unequivocal expression in
Achhut Kanya ("Untouchable Girl", 1936), a film directed by
Himanshu Rai of Bombay Talkies. The film portrays the travails of a
Harijan girl, played by Devika Rani, and a Brahmin boy, played by Ashok
Kumar.
The next noteworthy phase of Hindi cinema is associated with
personalities such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, and Guru Dutt. The son of
Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor created some of the most admired and
memorable films in Hindi cinema.
Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951), Shri 420 (1955), and Jagte Raho (1957)
were both commercial and critical successes. Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin,
which shows the influence of Italian neo-realism, explored the hard life
of the rural peasantry under the harshest conditions. In the meantime,
the Hindi cinema had seen the rise of its first acknowledged genius,
Guru Dutt, whose films critiqued the conventions of society and deplored
the conditions which induce artists to relinquish their inspiration.
From Barua's Devdas (1935) to Guru Dutt's Sahib, Bibi aur Gulam,the
motif of "predestined love" looms large: to many opponents, a
mawkish sentimentality characterizes even the best of the Hindi cinema
before the arrival of the new or alternative Indian cinema in the 1970s.
It is without doubt that under the influence of the Bengali film-makers
like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen, the Indian cinema, not
only in Hindi, also began to take a somewhat different turn in the 1970s
against the tide of commercial cinema, characterized by song-and-dance
routines, insignificant plots, and family dramas. Ghatak went on to
serve as Director of the Film and Television School at Pune, from where
the first generation of a new breed of Indian film-makers and actors -
Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, and Om Puri among the
latter was to emerge.
These film-makers, such as Shyam Benegal, Ketan Mehta, Govind Nihalani,
and Saeed Mirza, exhibited a different aesthetic and political
sensibility and were inclined to explore the caste and class
contradictions of Indian society, the nature of oppression suffered by
women, the dislocations created by industrialism and the migration from
rural to urban areas, the problem of landlessness, the impotency of
ordinary democratic and constitutional procedures of redress, and so on.
The well-liked Hindi cinema is characterized by important changes too
numerous to receive more than the slightest mention. The song-and-dance
routine is now more systematized, more regular in its patterns; the
'other', whether in the shape of the terrorist or the unalterable
villain, has a more gloomy presence; the nation-state is more fixated in
its demands on our loyalties and curtsy; the Indian Diaspora is a larger
presence in the Indian imagination and so on. These are only some
considerations: anyone wishing to discover the world of Indian cinema
should also replicate on its presence in Indian spaces, its relation to
vernacular art forms and mass art.
The Indian film industry, famously known as Bollywood, is the largest
in the world, and has major film studios in
Mumbai (Bombay),
Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore and
Hyderabad. Between
them, they turn out more than 1000 films a year to hugely appreciative
audiences around the world. For nearly 50 years, the Indian cinema has
been the central form of entertainment in India, and with its increased
visibility and success abroad, it won't be long until the Indian film
industry will be well thought-out to be its western counterpart-
Hollywood. Mainstream commercial releases, however, continue to dominate
the market, and not only in India, but wherever Indian cinema has a
large following, whether in much of the British Caribbean, Fiji, East
and South Africa, the U.K., United States, Canada, or the Middle East.
