originally published in Passion for cinema
“History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.“- by David McCullough, there I go a very cliched beginning to my article but this one line pretty much sums up what I feel and what is going to be the theme hereafter.
Bollywood is a term that has very little historical importance if any ,the term has no definite origins but there is widespread agreement that the term first appeared in a magazine inspired from the term Hollywood ,and our fascination with the west and the west’s fascination with themselves ensured that the term became popular in public discourse, the term is in fact despised by many including Amitabh Bachhan, who understand that our Cinema is unique in it’s own sense, has grown up in conditions unlike anywhere in the world and has a history that is not fully understood by people who compare it to the American Film Industry popularly known as Hollywood, in many respects it amounts to trivialization of our film history and obliterating our unique identity in one single stroke of pen.
Perhaps no other film industry in the world has played a part so important in a country’s history as Cinema in India has, and succeeded in such large measures in the face of such insurmountable odds ,carrying a burden as big as defining the identity of a nascent nation waiting to find it’s feet after 200 years of servitude .The popular perception being that cinema is just another form of entertainment and is at most the reflection of the current situation, our cinema has time and again defied the conventions by projecting religious harmony, breaking taboos and displaying a utopia in times of utter distress, perhaps cinema along with cricket is the only sphere of society in India where your caste or religion of birth does not influence your fortunes in their true sense.
To emphasize the importance of our movies in the socio-political scenario I would like to quote Ramachandra Guha from the book India after Gandhi who says that:
“So long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition ,so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails ,so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing ,so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army ,and – lest I forget – so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung ,India will survive.”
In a land fractured by linguistic and cultural differences the language of cinema has provided us with an important identity, a unifying one ,such is the power of this shared identity that Javed Saab remarks that we have an extra state in our federation ,a state called Hindi cinema ,a state which is the melting pot of all other states and defines who we are.
To put things in perspective we need to understand that unlike Hollywood when Cinema came to India ,we were still being ruled by the British and freedom struggle was in progress ,we were not sure of our destination or who we were ,in contrast American nation had been in existence for more than a century ,and had a well defined culture and identity ,while we had a multitude of languages, all of them contending for the top spot and hundreds of different cultures Hollywood knew that it’s language had to be English with one single culture to cater to ,while Hollywood had the status of an Industry and had all the capital in the world to invest ,Indian Cinema was started by rank amateurs at best with no money to invest and absolutely no market to promote and sell ,this problem was compounded by the fact that cinema was considered frivolous and morally corrupting by our National leaders as well as Britishers alike .Our leaders for a very very long time strongly believed that the colourful song and dance routines shown in Cinema would have a morally corrupting influence on the youth of the nation ,an attitude although mellowed persists till this date.
Quoting an excerpt from the book “India after Gandhi”
In September 1950 the chief minister of Rajasthan rued the “baneful influence” of motion pictures while admitting that he had seen only one motion picture himself ,three years later the Chief minister of Madras echoed the same sentiments when he asked the poor wage earners not to see cinema as they could find “better use for the money “. This sentiment was not restricted to the political class alone ,and in December 1952 a committee appointed by the syndicate of Calcutta university found that a major reason for the high failure rate in exams was that students were spending too much time at the movies ,two years later a petition was sent to the Prime Minister claiming that films threatened “the moral health of the country” . Lilavati Munshi an MP from Rajya Sabha in the winter of 1954 argued that films can mar or make an entire generation. To this the great Prithvi Raj Kapoor countered that In a free society art could not be throttled. A compromise was reached and the Censor Board was constituted.
As if these problems weren’t enough Indian Cinema itself was shunned by intellectuals ,first by the British who considered the song and dance routines inspired from our epics as a sham and then by the Indian intellectuals ;while the Russians were singing “Mera Joota hai Japani…” ,the best theaters in town never showed Hindi movies and the English educated Indian elite shunned Indian movies ,even Satyajit Ray grew up (as he himself describes) on a copious diet of western movies ,rather than Indian films ,which probably influenced the way he and other parallel breed of Indian film makers thought ,indeed years later the great showman Raj Kapoor and Satyajit Ray would have a show down at one of the foreign film festivals ,quoting again from “Bollywood a History” this time from the film maker Shyam Bengal himself, who says:
The Bombay film industry always thought that Ray was not doing right by India. Raj Kapoor and he had a big spat once. Raj Kapoor’s film ,Jaagte Raho,directed by Shambu Mitra ,a famous Bengali theatre director who had the same stature as Ray in cinema .Shambu made the film and it won Raj Kapoor an award in the 1964 Karolvy Vary film festival ,the same year that Aparajito won the Golden Lion in Venice. They met up at some meeting where both were being felicitated. So Ray said it was a great recognition for Bengali cinema.
Raj Kpoor said ‘Why Bengali ,are you not an Indian ? Why do you say you are a Bengali film-maker?’
Ray said ,’I am a Bengali film-maker’.
Raj Kapoor said ,’Why can’t you say you are an Indian film maker? For god’s sake.’
That was the spat. At that time ,young Indians were encouraged to say that you were an Indian ,not Bengali or Maharashtrian or any other region.
Perhaps it’s better not to judge Satyajit Ray as he himself was disillusioned with the Indian system having faced innumerable difficulties while making Pather Panchali as he has detailed in his memoir “My years with Apu” , moreover Ray was one of the last great products of Bengali renaissance along with two of his contemporaries Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen who sought to revitalise a dying Indian culture ,but alas from Independence onwards Bengal could not revive that cultural movement and since then we have seen Bengal’s decline.
In fact the best known thinking men of Indian Cinema who laid the foundations of Hindi Cinema have come from Bengal, names such as Bimal Roy ,Hrishikesh Mukherjee ,Manna Dey ,Hemanto and others ,those early years will also be remembered as the golden age of Bengali Cinema a time that would not replicate itself again and today the baton of cinema has passed from Bengal to the South.
The incident highlighted above gives a measure of the cynicism prevailing in the Indian intellectuals four decades back ,perhaps something that we still see in the Indian educated middle class who shun everything from politics to films.
Quoting Benegal again in support of the above statement:
None of our national leaders cared for films, not even Nehru. Our pre-independent national leaders always saw popular Indian films as culturally wanting. They thought they were culturally not good enough ,not artistic enough, and did not help in the evolution and development of the culture. They always thought it was a very inferior kind of work. This attitude also infected the urban upper and middle-classes.
Perhaps many don’t know that Indian films until the 1930’s were like Hollywood movies but the arrival of sound totally transformed the scenario ,Shyam Benegal says :
During the silent film era of Indian cinema our films used to look like every other film made everywhere else in the world ,But the moment sound came we suddenly went back to our theatrical traditional form. That was the moment 1931 ,when our first sound film was made ,Alam Ara which had something like thirty songs and after that movies started having sixteen or seventeen songs ,and most films from then on used to have a huge number of songs ,because music was an essential part of Indian cinema .
This change reflects the way we think ,the way Indians see drama ,comedy and musical ,Western style has always been to classify material into various compartments or genres such as comedy ,musical ,thriller ,while we prefer to combine everything into one ,to take an analogy ,if we look at the classical western meal ,we will see that it comprises of a four or five courses with every course being served in a particular order ,while it’s Indian counter part is the “Thali” where everything is served at once and there are no specific rules for eating and one can definitely gorge on the dessert even before one has touched the main course.
To illustrate how our cinema has been in sync with our culture as a whole we must note that our folk tales ,epics and drama most notably Sanskrit drama which incidentally is called ‘Natya‘ ,these are mostly sung rather than being enacted and the character on the stage usually overplays himself/herself sometimes bordering on the hyperbole ,the plays/acts also tend to form a regular pattern like ,some tragedy followed by climax followed by a happy reunion ,and finally the moral lesson ,some notable examples are ‘Jatra‘ from West Bengal ,’Yakshagana‘ from Karnataka ,’Ram Leela‘ from North and many others.
In that sense movies with all the song ,dance/melodrama are just a continuation of our folksong/theater tradition ,which partly explains our fascination with cinema as a whole. and it is a trend that has continued in it’s various forms and facets well into the 21st century.
On a personal note I clearly remember my Kenyan classmate telling me that generally with western movies of another language you needed subtitles to understand the movie but with Indian films you could dispense with it since most of the communication was through body language and gestures ,in itself this was very simple observation but when taken in the entire perspective it showcases why our movies so simple to understand and are loved by one and all.
Delving back again into history we note that when Dhundiraj Govind Phalke ,popularly known as Dadasaheb Phalke saw The Life of Christ on screen and like a true visionary he instantly realized the potential that lay in this medium and how he could adapt the same for the Indian Audiences ,it instantly struck him that our epics and mythological stories would have provided ample raw material in the form of scripts and stories to be adapted on screen ,and remarkably for the first few years starting with the first movie Raja Harishchandra almost all movies barring a few exceptions tended to be mythologicals ,a trend that would go on well into the fifties and sixties. Quoting again from “Bollywood A History” : an excerpt published in the Phalke Centenary Souvenir published in 1970 ,Saraswatibai Phalke recounts the evening that changed the face of Indian Cinema :
We both went to see the ‘cinema’ in an illuminated tent on Sandhurst Road where a band was playing. It was called the America-India Cinematograph. The first class tickets were priced at eight annas. It was Christmas 1911 and the hall was crowded with Christians and Europeans .The lights were then switched off and there appeared the picture of a cock moving on the screen. This was the trade mark of the Pathe Company .Then a comic picture started ,featuring an actor called Foolshead. After every part of the film the lights were switched on and stage items of magic ,or physical feats were performed. The main picture that day was The Life of Christ. People were weeping on seeing the sufferings of Christ and the Crucifixion. The film was coloured in the Kinemacolour process. On the way back ,Dadasaheb said Like the life of Christ ,we shall make pictures about Rama and Krishna’ I was not at all happy to hear that and kept quiet.
After reading all this one may get the impression that Indian Cinema is only full of masala movies ,potboilers and mythologicals but remember that India is such a diverse country that for everything you tend to say about India the reverse is also probably true and we have had quite a few path breakers amongst ourselves ,though our artistic liberties were always curtailed considering the volatile socio political scenarios in our country people who dared to do things differently have always been rewarded. The 1936 film “Achhut Kanya” was perhaps more revolutionary than any other movie if we take into account the intense caste cauldron of the 1930’s ,it was a box office hit of it’s time and sent Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani’s careers into stardom ,the 1953 movie “Do Beegha Zameen” also tasted box office movie even though critics had hailed it as a great piece of realistic cinema ,in fact most of Bimal Roy’s movies managed to marry box office success with social reality ,but perhaps none can match the oddity of a movie that critics had predicted would fail miserably at the box office since it bucked the trend of melodrama and introduced the concept of a tragic ending ,the movie I am talking about is none other than Devdas based on a novel of the same by a Bengal renaissance writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay ,first adapted by PC Barua, the novel and the movie has since been adapted in most of the major Indian languages with adaptations continuing well into the 21st century. The entire novel has been described as a tragedy from the start to end but still it was lapped up by the audiences like never before ,apart from this there have been many notable exceptions at regular intervals which have constantly baffled analysts who look for a continuous trend at the box office ,perhaps the only pattern that emerges from this is that any concept ,whether old or radical ,suitably indianised and presented in a good format will be lapped up by the audiences.
The tradition of singing is perhaps as old as the Vedas and classical music has had deep roots in this country ,this combined with the Mughal and Persian style of Sufi Music created a unique art form called the Hindustani ,and along with it’s southern counterpart the Carnatic style of music completed the Indian classical picture .After the advent of the British and the demise of the Indian rulers the patronage that these traditional artists enjoyed also disappeared and this nearly resulted in the death of the classical form of music in the north ,down south the traditions were stronger and classical music had survived.
As I have already mentioned before that Indian Cinema parted ways with the west with the coming of the sound ,perhaps this was inevitable owing to our strong traditions in the field of music but this none the less changed the whole scene in India.
This also brings us to another unique Indian invention called Playback Singing ,the origins of this can be traced to the fact that Indians did not have high quality sound equipment or good studios to begin with ,and this caused a lot of problem since it was almost impossible to shoot in sync sound with so much of noise around you ,so people came up with an alternative in which they would make the actors lip sync while shooting in the open and then later record the sound at the studio.
This was revolutionary in the sense that this combined with our musical traditions would ensure the marriage of Indian classical music with Indian Cinema and lead to the birth of another Industry.
It would be interesting to note that in the beginning Film music like acting was considered frivolous ,unsuitable for respectable people in society ,even the big names in music shunned it entirely ,an interesting anecdote mentioned by Naushad himself goes as follows ,Naushad and Asif had gone to Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan to persuade him to sing for Asif’s upcoming movie.
Khaan Saab loved eating, and the more people, the merrier. We arrived in time for a meal. On seeing us, he asked us for the reason for our visit.I explained the reason.But he refused point blank ,as he found singing in films very frivolous. ‘Naushad saab’ ,he said ,’three minutes was not enough for anybody to sing ,especially people like me who need at least half an hour to clear my throat.’
However Asif eventually proved to be a persuasive fellow ,and finally got Khaan Saab to sing for his movie ,the movie was Mughal-E-Azam and the rest as they say is history.
But as this incident shows it was not easy for the early directors and film makers to get talented people from the middle and upper middle class involved in their ventures ,even acting was considered something of a taboo ,as with this incident there were innumerable such incidents which show that Indian Cinema has indeed been very lucky to reach a place it has today.
It has been blamed for everything starting from students failing in the schools/colleges to increasing crime rate in society ,from destroying the Indian culture to being a corrupting influence on the youth. Devoid of capital ,facing increased censorship in the face of competition from foreign films ,facing lack of infrastructure, black money ,extortion ,an uncertain future ,repression at the hands of foreign rulers and not to forget neglect from the Indian intelligentsia ,Indian cinema has done more than what was expected of it by carrying the burden of a nascent nation and by defining the identity of India in a way that makes us all proud.
(sample this: while our early cinema was mostly harmless mythology preaching victory of good over evil ,the west was making classics like “The Birth of a Nation” by D.W .Griffith which would go on to popularize Ku Klux Klan)
The anecdotes presented here are just a few that come to my mind when I think about our past ,a more detailed account is beyond the scope of this article ,however without being judgemental or emotional we can safely say that over the years Hindi Cinema has carved a unique identity of it’s own which is separate from foreign cinema esp western cinema ,this becomes more evident when we see the impact of Indian cinema in Africa ,the Middle East and Far east in a way that is very different from Hollywood ,whatever may be the readers interpretation of the recent success of Slumdog Millionaire ,one clear inference which can be drawn from this entire episode is that the concept of Indian Masala is still alien to the west owing to it’s uniqueness.
Hindi Cinemas lack of presence at Western movie awards like the Oscars doesn’t necessarily represent the lack of creativity or quality in Indian cinema ,it does however represent a lack of appreciation or understanding for a unique form like ours.
This does not mean that masala is the only type of movies that we can produce ,it would be important to note that although we did experiment with the khichdi form of movie making from early on in our history ,true blue masala movies only began with Amitabh Bachhan’s arrival and till then movies used to be script based ,even with Hindi parallel cinema which began with Ray’s brilliant Apu Trilogy has had relatively few successes at the international level (if we discount big names like Ray).
This phenomenon has often led to the charge that Indian cinema does not have the quality of Hollywood , a charge which does not hold much water not only because quality is a subjective term but also for the reason that Indian film-makers have experimented with numerous genres of cinema and produced ample amount of critically acclaimed movies ,names like Guru Dutt ,Bimal Roy ,Hrishikesh Mukherjee ,Adoor Gopalakrishnan ,Shyam Benegal are known throughout India as legends of realistic cinema but inspite of their repeated efforts their movies have failed to project India as a maker of quality movies in the West.
The charge that Indian audiences don’t like departure from masala also doesn’t hold any water,as mentioned earlier they have time and again proved that they can handle radical content and themes provided that the content has been suitably Indianised and presented properly. In fact during this discussion ,detractors often miss the point that in Hollywood too the movies that have been hailed as masterpieces and path breaking have mostly been products of independent cinema ,the major studios on the other hand are mostly involved in what can be at best termed as ‘Hollywood Masala’ and it is this particular kind of movie that provides Hollywood with the kind of economy of scale that it is known for.
It would be safe to assume at this point that with the evolution of free market and betterment of living standards in India the markets for this parallel breed of cinema will find more lovers and the tag of Indian films being unidimensional would also disappear ,till then we can take pride in the fact that Indian cinema has carved us a unique identity in the face of insurmountable odds and is poised to overtake Hollywood in terms of economy and impact over the next few years.
I leave it here with a quote from the book “Maximum City” by Suketu Mehta who writes :
India is one of the few territories in which Hollywood has been unable to make more than a dent; Hollwood films make up barely 5% of the country’s market. Resourceful saboteurs ,the Hindi movie-makers. When every other country’s cinema had fallen before Hollywood ,India met Hollywood the Hindu way. It welcomed it, swallowed it whole and regurgitated it. What went in ,blended with everything that had existed before ,and came back out with ten new heads.
References and Suggested Reading:
- India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha -Picador India Publications
- Bollywood A History by Mihir Bose – Roli Books
- The Elephant ,The Tiger and The Cellphone by Shashi Tharoor
- Maximum City by Suketu Mehta -Random Publications
- Diversity of Indian Cinema
- Cinema of India (wikipedia)
- Chetan Anand -Maker of innovative Cinema (The Hindu)
- My Years with Apu – Memoir by Satyajit Ray
,but on the positive side it has nothing to do with Linux, Moblin runs fine, I have had a few hiccups though as I mentioned in my last post. But like all problems they all get sorted out in the end.
What is the purpose of Cinema? Is it merely just another form of recreation or a reflection of something much deeper ? Over the last hundred years or so, cinema has come to mean much more than just another form of entertainment, it has in fact evolved into more than just an art form, the directors medium has come to reflect who we are and where we are going, it is a canvas of our hopes and aspirations and a mirror to our own self.
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