India

The fact that India annually produces more films than any other nation is frequently acknowledged but easily misunderstood. "Indian cinema" identifies a diverse range of popular and art cinemas regularly produced in at least half a dozen languages for large but distinct audiences within and outside India. For much of the West, Indian cinema was long identified almost exclusively with the work of the Bengali director Satyajit Ray (1921–1992), whose realist films consciously differed from the majority of those made in India. Increased international awareness of the popular Hindi-language film industry in Bombay (now officially Mumbai), known with both affection and condescension as Bollywood, can lead to the inference that all Indian cinema adheres to a song-filled melodramatic formula. Yet reducing Indian cinema to either Ray's art films or a generic masala (spicy mix) model misrepresents Indian cinema, as international film critics have begun to point out. Moreover, the complex history of cinema in India—with roots in ancient culture, material origins under British colonialism, and local dominance following independence—also challenges easy generalizations about what is among the world's most heterogeneous as well as prolific national cinemas.

EARLY INDIAN CINEMA

The deepest cultural roots of Indian cinema may be ancient: the Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana remain familiar sources for film narratives and allusions, and classical rasa (juice, or flavor) aesthetics is sometimes cited to explain the mixture of diverse elements found in popular Indian films. The central visual interaction of Hindu worship, darshan (viewing), has also been identified as a cultural source for the regular formal reliance on frontal framing and direct address in popular cinema. Theatrical forms such as the Westernized Parsi (or Parsee) theater and the Marathi Sangeet Natak (musical theater) immediately preceded the arrival of cinema and provided more direct sources for some of the techniques (such as the regular incorporation of song and dance) that distinguish Indian cinema, and these also supplied many of the new medium's first performers and financiers. The mass-produced lithographs of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), often depicting Hindu gods and goddesses in naturalistic forms and settings, were also influential transitional works encouraging the adaptation of Indian visual traditions into the realistic media of early photography and film.

Cinema itself first appeared in India when the Lumière Cinématographe was exhibited in Bombay at Watson's Hotel on 7 July 1896. Screenings in Calcutta and Madras soon followed, and by 1898 the Indian photographers Hiralal Sen (1866–1917) (founder of the Royal Bioscope Company in Calcutta) and H. S. Bhatavdekar (b. 1868) began producing short films and recording popular theater performances. Although he was not the first Indian to shoot or exhibit films, the "father of Indian cinema" is justifiably identified as Dhundiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke (1870–1944), whose Raja Harishchandra (1913), drawn from a story in the Mahabharata, initiated feature-length narrative films of distinctively Indian character. According to legend, viewing a film depicting the life of Christ inspired Phalke to put Hindu gods on screen, a motive that aligned him with the swadeshi (indigenous) movement demanding independence from Britain through boycott of foreign goods. Following Phalke's lead, well over a thousand silent films were produced in India, but the fact that few have survived frustrates accurate accounts of the first decades of cinema produced in India.

In 1906 J. F. Madan's Elphinstone Bioscope Company in Calcutta began regular film production, and by 1917 Baburao Painter established the Maharashtra Film Company in Kolhapur. For the following two decades, an expanding studio system would ensure steady film production throughout India: by the early 1930s, major studios such as New Theatres (Calcutta), Prabhat (Pune), and the Bombay-based Kohinoor Film Company, Imperial Film Company, Wadia Movietone, Ranjit Movietone, and Bombay Talkies offered audiences commercially differentiated genres and distinctive stars. Himansu Rai's Bombay Talkies, organized as a corporation, relied on European financing, technology, and talent (notably the German director Franz Osten [1876–1956]); in 1940 Rai's widow and the studio's biggest female star, Devika Rani (1907–1994), took over the company. India's first sound film, Alam Ara (1931), directed by Ardeshir M. Irani (1886–1969) for Imperial, firmly established the importance of song and dance sequences in popular Indian cinema as well as the future identification of Indian films along regional lines determined by language. By the following year, V. Shantaram (1901–1990) began to direct innovative films in both Marathi and Hindi for Prabhat (often starring the legendary actress Durga Khote [1905–1991]), demonstrating Indian cinema's quick adjustment to new sound technologies as well as different linguistic markets. However, as Bombay became the center of Indian film production, a variety of spoken Hindi—or Hindustani—would soon establish itself as Indian cinema's dominant screen language.

INDIAN CINEMA AFTER INDEPENDENCE

Amid the deprivations of World War II (including shortages of raw film stock), increased colonial censorship, a devastating famine in Bengal, and the traumatic partition of India and Pakistan upon independence in 1947, the studio system in India came to an end. But the optimism of the era embodied by the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (who served from 1947 to 1964), also led to a revitalized Hindi cinema under the impact of new independent production companies established by key directors like Mehboob Khan (1907–1964) and Bimal Roy (1909–1966). In addition, actor-directors like Raj Kapoor (1924–1988) and Guru Dutt (1925–1964) became brand names in the industry: Kapoor created R. K. Films; Sippy and Rajshree Films became the banner for several generations of the Sippy and Barjatya families, respectively; and brothers B. R. (b. 1914) and Yash Chopra (b. 1932) created their own B. R. Chopra and Yashraj production companies. Previously unknown artists dislocated by Partition arrived from the newly created state of Pakistan and rose to stardom as actors, directors, or producers, becoming urban legends. The rich body of films produced in the 1950s, the decade following independence, frequently balanced entertainment and social commentary, the latter often supplied by an infusion of talent affiliated with the leftist Progressive Writers Association and the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association, a talent pool that marshaled cinema for covert political messages before independence and continued to project Nehru's optimism about nation-building for about a decade after independence. Driven by stars and songs, the popular cinema firmly established itself in the daily lives and cultural imaginations of millions of Indians as well as audiences in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. This "golden age" of Hindi cinema was ending just as Satyajit Ray's first films were receiving international attention, and the 1960s would draw sharp distinctions between formulaic commercial cinema and what would be called the New Indian Cinema, the latter signaling both a shift in form and content as well as a reliance on state-sponsored financing never available to mainstream cinema.

The 1970s was a period of rising worker, peasant, and student unrest. In this changing political climate, films became more strident in addressing endemic corruption and the state's inability to stem it, and upheld the victimized working-class hero as challenging the status quo. These films, including Deewar (The Wall, 1975) and the massive hit Sholay (Flames, 1975), became the insignia of superstar Amitabh Bachchan (b. 1942), who embodied the "angry young man" during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's "Emergency" clampdown on civil liberties (from 1975 to 1977) and into the mid-1980s. They departed significantly from 1950s films in their lack of optimism and from 1960s films in the radically truncated attention to the hero's romantic love interest. However, from the late 1980s on, the eclipse of Bachchan's centrality coincided with the revival of romance that returned to the screen as a culture war between the youthful (often Westernized) couple in love and their tradition-bound parents. In record-breaking hits like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Hearted Will Take the Bride, 1995) and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who Am I To You?, 1994), balancing the rights of rugged individualism and duty toward family and community took center stage.

These films arrived against the backdrop of the Indian state's abandoning forty years of Nehruvian socialism for a market-driven "liberalized" economy at the end of the Cold War. Alongside these romance films about the changing family and the private sphere were slick portrayals of the urban (and occasionally the rural) underworld in proliferating gangster films such as Satya (1998) and Company (2002), which mapped a decaying public sphere and audaciously represented onscreen the actual infiltration of the offscreen film world by underworld "black money" financing and extortion. Although cinema remains extremely popular in India, the increased availability of a films (via video, digital technology, and cable television) outside of India has illuminated the importance of a film's international circulation among

RAJ KAPOOR
b. Ranbirraj Kapoor, Peshawar, India (now Pakistan), 14 December 1924, d. 2 June 1988

Raj Kapoor is the quintessential Bombay industry filmmaker of the Nehru era. His career spans the first four decades following independence, from 1947 to 1988, coinciding with Nehruvian socialism. In 1991 socialism was abandoned in favor of "liberalization," opening India's economy to the West. In the 1950s Kapoor translated his own admiration and his generation's enthusiasm for Prime Minister Nehru's vision into extremely popular Hindi films, which he infused with his unique mix of populist politics and sentimentality.

Raj Kapoor's father, Prithviraj Kapoor, was an established film actor by the 1940s, and Raj's career developed rapidly. After minor roles and his debut as a leading man in Neel Kamal (Blue Lotus, 1947), he acted in and directed Aag (Fire, 1948), followed by successes as actor in and director of Barsaat (Rain, alsoknownas The Monsoons, 1949), and as actor in Andaz (A Matter of Style, 1949), the latter two films pairing him unforgettably with the actress Nargis. In 1951 he launched his own studio, R. K. Films, which his son, Randhir, took over in 1988 (his granddaughters, Karisma and Kareena Kapoor, also joined the film industry in the late 1980s and 1990s, respectively).

Kapoor chose dramatic dichotomies to play up the conflicts that Hindi films emphasize: between city and country, modernity and tradition, West and East, rich and poor. His protagonists, inevitably underprivileged, are drawn inexorably to the city, only to discover the pervasive corruption and danger lurking beneath its glossy surface. This exposition reinforces the protagonist's moral fortitude to surmount his travails and, together with his love interest, surge toward a joyous future while at the same time apparently valorizing "Indian" values. Conscious of international cinema, Kapoor paid homage to Charlie Chaplin by adapting the figure of the tramp, and the narratives unfold from his point of view in the greatest R. K. Films of the 1950s, Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) and Shri 420 (Mr. 420, 1955), both of which he starred in and directed. Kapoor became an unofficial ambassador of Indian cinema; he was warmly received in the Soviet Union when he visited in the 1950s, and his popularity spread in the Middle East, China, and Africa, where songs from his films were translated into local languages.

In the postwar era stars were powerful figures, and their offscreen lives mediated the public discourse on morality. Raj Kapoor's extended affair with co-star Nargis was a scandal he circumvented by staying in his marriage and representing himself in the public eye as a "family man," a family that is now virtually a film industry empire built over four generations. Deftly combining "art and commerce"—his functional definition of popular cinema—Kapoor was a phenomenal success in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his output dwindled dramatically. Barring the hit teen romance Bobby (1973), in which he did not appear, his often ambitious and thinly autobiographical films from these decades lost touch with the popular mood and failed at the box office, oddly paralleling the troubles besetting the Nehruvian project.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Barsaat (Rain, 1949), Awara (The Vagabond, 1951), Shri 420 (Mr. 420, 1955), Bobby (1973), Satyam Shivam Sundaram: Love Sublime (1978)

FURTHER READING

Chatterjee, Gayatri. Awara. New ed. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.

Reuben, Bunny. Raj Kapoor: The Fabulous Showman. New Delhi: Indus HarperCollins, 1995.

Sahai, Malti, and Wimal Dissanayake. Raj Kapoor's Films: Harmony of Discourse. New Delhi: Vikas, 1988.

Corey K. Creekmur

Jyotika Virdi

the nonresident Indian (NRI) or diasporic audience in Africa, Australia, Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, and the US. At the same time, hints of a growing non-Indian audience for Indian cinema are evident, in some measure through the emergence of a body of serious criticism on Indian cinema being published internationally.

Critical writing on Hindi cinema has come to focus on how it both reflects and fuels the project of constructing a nation and national identity. Popular cinema, often mistaken for being formulaic and repetitive, mobilizes the nation to maintain the dynamic work of self-reinvention. Hindi film narratives are typically about a protagonist, his family, and a set of stock characters: the hero; his love interest, the heroine; a comic figure, often the hero's sidekick; and the villain, a foil in the narrative, the obstacle the hero overcomes to attain his goal.

The villain's representation is particularly fascinating for the way it changes over the decades: from urban tycoons and village money-lenders in the 1950s and 1960s to "smugglers" violating India's tariff policies in the 1970s, unyielding patriarchs in 1980s romance films, and politicians or terrorists in the 1990s. Villains anchor national discourse, becoming emblematic of threats the nation faces and anxieties the films rearticulate in public discourse. Films from the 1950s tend to cast the rich as powerful and corrupt; the 1970s and 1990s versions of these films display a stylistic sophistication in their exposition of the links between financial and political power held by mobsters and politicians. If the 1950s hero was a benign figure, resolute in his ideals to work with "the system," the 1970s hero openly rebelled against its unfairness or made it work for him. In the 1990s gangster films, the hero's pathology, descent into crime, and fatal end are often the central point of the narrative. A variation on the gangster films tracing the underworld's fascinating topography are the 1990s films tracking the rise and fall of youth, victims of religious fundamentalism turning to terrorism, and action films in which the hero represents state power (law enforcement or the armed forces) putting down such terrorists. Villains and heroes are antagonistic forces: one represents the threat to the nation, the other its containment, thereby keeping the nation center-stage.

In addition to heroes and villains other figures trace the national imaginary. The woman in her role as a mother often stands in for the nation, a figure to be rescued and protected. The mother as an object of pity, exhorting her sons to save her, is rooted in an older moment of nineteenth-century cultural renaissance when Indian art and literature was imbued with anticolonial nationalist fervor. The nation is personified as the mother (Bharat Mata or Mother India) in numerous plays, novels, poems, posters, and paintings. Popular Hindi cinema seizes upon this figure and the mother–son bond has powerful cultural resonance, recurring in seminal films, from Mehboob Khan's remake of Aurat/Woman (1940) as Mother India (1957) to Yash Chopra's Deewar/Wall (1975). In the heroine/love interest role, the woman is cast as the repository of the "East," signifying an-tiindividualism, family and community values, and tradition, as distinct from the "West" and its woman.

TRENDS AND GENRES

The early desire to put Indian stories on screen led pioneers like Phalke to mine the rich tradition of Hindu religious and folk narratives to produce "mythologicals," films that dramatized the popular stories of gods and goddesses. (Eventually rare in Hindi cinema, the mythological would reemerge most prominently via massively popular television serials in the 1980s.) By the 1930s, mythologicals competed with "devotionals" like New Theatre's Meerabai (1933) and Prabhat's Sant Tukaram (1936), which recounted the inspiring stories of Hindu poet-saints. However, such distinctive religious genres were balanced by the regular production of dramas, comedies, and popular stunt films that translated Western serials and the films of Douglas Fairbanks into Indian locations and idioms. The Anglo-Indian star Fearless Nadia (1908–1996) dominated the stunt genre in films for Wadia Movietone like Hunterwali (1935) and Miss Frontier Mail (1936). "Historicals," set in the near or distant past, became an especially effective form to both affirm cultural traditions and introduce vast spectacles: historicals set in the Mughal period (1526–1858) like Shiraz (1928) or Humayun (1945), entranced audiences with their luxurious sets and ornate costumes.

However, following independence, most popular Hindi films would be broadly identified as "socials," set in the present and confronting the meaning of modern Indian identity and society. The roots of 1950s socials can be traced to successful 1930s films in which romantic love faces caste boundaries, as in Rai's Achhut Kanya (Untouchable Girl, 1936), or class divisions, as in Devdas (1935), a film remade prominently in 1956 and again in 2002. By the 1950s, socials, poignant narratives about the crippling effects of cultural barriers in a society rebuilding itself, would parallel contemporaneous Hollywood melodramas dealing with the aftermath of war or the politics of race. Hindi films from this period regularly examined caste, feudalism, the dispossession of peasants, the trauma of urban migration, and alienating urban culture, all within a popular format driven by a star system and the promise of song sequences. These include Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (Thirsty One, 1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 1959), Raj Kapoor's Awara (Vagabond, 1951) and Shri 420 (Mr. 420, 1955), and Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (Two Acres of Land, 1953) and Sujata (1959), to mention a few.

At the same time, socials maintained their function as entertainment, featuring songs, comic bits, and massively popular stars along with social messages. For instance, the production company Navketan specialized in urban thrillers, such as Taxi Driver (1955) and C.I.D. (1956), starring co-founder Dev Anand (b. 1923). A notable subgenre of "Muslim socials" explored the significance of India's most prominent minority identity, often relying on the romantic and poetic traditions of Urdu literature to elevate such narratives with stunning song and dance sequences in films like Mughal-e-Azam (The Grand Emperor, K. Asif, 1960) or Mere Mehboob (My Love, Rawail, 1963). However, despite this history of distinct genres, the popular Indian film eventually adhered to a formula, the masala film, which combined comedy, drama, romance, and action, along with a requisite number of song sequences, in a mix of "flavors" that critics have traced to ancient Sanskrit dramaturgy and aesthetics. For Western viewers, such films can seem fragmented and incoherent because of their shifts in tone and style; but for Indian viewers expecting a range of carefully coordinated attractions, the combination yields a satisfying whole, unlike Western films narrowly confined to a single mood. Typically running three hours and divided by an often cliff-hanging interval (intermission), the mainstream masala film allows for both repetitious formula and creative variation.

NATIONAL CINEMA AND REGIONAL CINEMAS

Hindi, a language common to northern India but that varies by region, has had a complex relationship with cinema and national politics. Declared a national language after independence, Hindi has met powerful resistance in southern states. Yet the popularity of Hindi cinema has allowed it to cut across regional and linguistic divisions, giving Bombay cinema a national or "all-India" status distinct from regional language cinemas that usually remain limited to audiences within the states in which they are produced. Emerging as a language of trade in colonial and multilingual Bombay, Hindi was popularized through cinema as Hindustani, a hybrid of Persian-based Urdu and northern Indian dialects, arguably more native to cinema than any distinct region. After independence strains of Urdu associated with Muslim influence were slowly diluted and replaced by Sanskrit vocabulary, identified with the majority's Hindu culture. Hindi film songs especially drew heavily on Urdu, which lends itself to poetry and drama; although this reliance has been reduced in the postindependence period at the cost of some poetic flair, many of the key terms in cinema, especially for discussing the varieties of love, retain Urdu influences. At the same time, some Hindi films have successfully employed the regional Bhojpuri dialect (popularly associated with rustics), and the street slang of contemporary Mumbai has also cropped up in film, commonly mixed with English words and phrases; these trends continue to undermine the easy identification of "Hindi" cinema strictly in terms of its language.

Although Hindi cinema emerged as India's most prominent and broadly popular form, its dominant status as a national commodity has often been challenged by or threatens to obscure the steady production of films in India's regional cinemas, often in annual numbers rivaling or exceeding Bombay's figures. (The claim that India leads the world in film production depends on collapsing these differences into a total national figure.) Although the arrival of sound in Indian cinema eventually isolated the production and distribution of films by linguistic regions, early sound studios often produced films in multiple languages before dubbing became a common practice. Films produced in the major South Indian languages of Tamil and Telegu have generated some crossover artists, exemplified by Mani Ratnam (b. 1956), maker of the controversial Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), and the prolific composer A.R. Rahman (b. 1966), both active in the Bombay industry. Ratnam is also among the leading filmmakers who bridged the divergent popular and art cinema by melding their aesthetics in superbly crafted films.

In addition to the Bengali art cinema associated internationally with Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976), and Mrinal Sen (b. 1923), the regular production of popular Bengali cinema has challenged Hindi cinema in a major urban market like Calcutta. Films produced in the southwestern state of Kerala in the Malayalam language also reflect that state's distinct leftist political history, with the work of directors G. Aravindan (1935–1991) and Adoor Gopalakrishnan (b. 1941) receiving international acclaim. Although relatively small in number, films produced in languages such as Kannada (from Karnataka), Marathi (from Maharastra, which includes Mumbai), Assamese (from Assam), or Oryia (from Orissa) round out an unusually diverse linguistic map, rendering the typical association of a national cinema with a single national language entirely untenable for India. In a few cases, prominent figures such as the actor-director-writer Kamal Hassan (b. 1954) have traversed regional cinemas and worked in Hindi cinema, whereas others find immense success only within a particular context. Moreover, art cinemas produced within any region often share stylistic and thematic affiliations that override the linguistic distinctions that otherwise distinguish popular films by region.

SATYAJIT RAY
b. Calcutta, India, 2 May 1921, d. 23 April 1992

The American premiere of Satyajit Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in 1955 elevated the director into the pantheon of the world's great humanist filmmakers, and he remains India's most internationally known director. Although the West viewed Ray's first films as essentially Indian, within India Ray's films clearly demonstrated his inheritance of the modernist values of the cosmopolitan Bengali renaissance. Ray was nurtured within a notably artistic family with close connections to the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (whose work Ray would later frequently adapt to film), and as a young man Ray's taste in movies was fully international.

As a co-founder in 1947 of the Calcutta Film Society, he was a keen student of Soviet and European cinema, especially the Italian neorealist films that directly inspired his first film and their sequels, Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959).Together eventually known as the Apu Trilogy, the three films trace the development of the eponymous central figure from childhood to maturity and fatherhood as he moves from his remote village in Bengal to the holy city of Benares and finally to modern Calcutta, replicating the urbanization of many modern Indians. The Apu Trilogy featured music composed and performed by Ravi Shankar, who would become internationally famous soon thereafter. In the final film of the trilogy, Ray introduced the actors Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore, who would become regular members of Ray's troupe of collaborators, with Chatterjee eventually appearing in fifteen of Ray's films.

The remarkable achievement of the Apu trilogy has sometimes obscured Ray's other works, many of which, including Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and Devi (The Goddess, 1960), function more as psychological explorations than realist dramas. Another group, including Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1984), explore the social complexities of the recent colonial past with meticulous attention to detail. The full range of Ray's achievement, which his international reputation elides, includes documentaries as well as a series of remarkable and immensely popular children's films featuring the comic duo Goopy and Bagha, characters created by Ray's grandfather decades earlier. Ray was also a writer, publisher, and painter.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958), Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), Devi (The Goddess, 1960), Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1968), Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1984)

FURTHER READING

Cooper, Darius. The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Ganguly, Suranjan. Satyajit Ray: In Search of the Modern. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.

Ray, Satyajit. Our Films, Their Films: Essays. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976; New York: Hyperion Books, 1994.

Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye—The Biography of a Master Film-Maker. New ed. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

Wood, Robin. The Apu Trilogy. New York: Praeger, 1971.

Corey K. Creekmur

Jyotika Virdi

FILM MUSIC

Along with extremely popular stars, commercial Indian cinema attracts its massive audience through prominently featured songs, and elaborate song-sequences, in virtually all popular films. Although early sound films relied on singing actors, like the stars K. L. Saigal (1904–1947), Noorjehan (1926–2000), and Suraiya (1929–2004), the eventual development of "playback" recording technology isolated the voice and body, creating an offscreen star system of "playback singers" who provide the singing voices of onscreen stars. Among these, the sisters Lata Mangeshkar (b. 1929) and Asha Bhosle (b. 1933) have virtually defined the female singing voice in Hindi cinema for decades; male playback singers like Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi (1924–1980), and Kishore Kumar (1929–1987) were often closely associated with the

leading men for whom they regularly voiced songs. Prominent and prolific music directors such as Naushad, S. D. Burman (1906–1975), and the team of Laxmikant–Pyrelal (Laxmikant [1935–1998] and Pyrelal [b. 1940]), as well as lyricists (often prominent poets), are also familiar to fans and frequently more famous than the actors they support.

Although film songs have been criticized for their impure borrowing of styles (especially in the hands of pop maestros like R. D. Burman, famous for his rock and jazz inflections), they often rely on traditional Indian instruments and song forms (such as the Urdu ghazal and Hindu bhajan), even as instances of prominently featured electric guitars and disco beats have increased. For a while All India Radio banned film songs in favor of classical music, leading millions to tune in Radio Ceylon, which featured film songs until the national service reconsidered its stance. Dance in Indian cinema also draws on classical traditions as well as the latest Western fads in roughly equal measure. Film songs regularly extend their significance well beyond specific films, and the latest hits as well as evergreen favorites can be heard throughout India as the music of everyday life as well as special occasions. Hit film songs also provide a storehouse of references and allusions for later films, which often evoke familiar lyrics in their titles.

Among the principal attractions of Hindi cinema is the song sequence, commonly referred to as "picturization," which crosses the boundaries between genres. Almost all popular Indian films feature a number of picturized songs, but it is misleading to identify such films as "musicals." Songs rather than films are often grouped by style and narrative function: love songs dominate, but devotional, comic, and patriotic songs all have their place in Indian cinema. A number of the most famous dance sequences in Indian cinema are celebrated for their sheer scale or intricate choreography of dance and camerawork. Some directors have expressed resentment at the unofficial requirement to include song sequences in every film, but others are famous for their ability to creatively picturize songs. Guru Dutt is now legendary for his intricate and highly cinematic song and dance sequences, whereas Yash Chopra initiated a popular trend of picturizing songs in exotic, often European, locations despite the Indian settings of his narratives. Other directors, such as Subash Ghai (b. 1943), are known for wildly comic songs (often allowing the otherwise serious Amitabh Bachchan to cut loose), whereas Mani Ratnam has dared to place his dancing stars among the riot-scarred locations of contemporary political violence.

STARS

Like Hollywood, Indian cinema recognized the commercial value and appeal of stars early on, even though early debates questioned whether respectable women should appear in films. Early stars often had backgrounds in theater, but the first major female stars of Indian cinema before Devika Rani (1907–1994) (the leading lady at Bombay Talkies and eventual head of the studio) were often Anglo-Indian, including Patience Cooper, Sulochana (Ruby Meyers; 1907–1983), and the stunt queen Fearless Nadia (Mary Evans). The melancholic singer K. L. Saigal was the first great male star of the sound era, to be displaced by the more talented actor Ashok Kumar (1911–2001), whose film career lasted for decades. Two of the greatest directors of 1950s Hindi cinema, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, were also stars who conveniently represented opposites poles of light and dark moods. The golden age's female stars, including Nargis (1929–1981), Madhubala (1933–1969), and Waheeda Rehman (b. 1936), often balanced on the tightrope between traditional Indian femininity and Hollywood glamour, while the romantic and often tragic Dilip Kumar emerged in the same period as perhaps Hindi cinema's most enduring leading man. Typically, male stars in India enjoy long careers, whereas many female stars drop out of films when they marry, perhaps to return later to play "mother" roles.

Even the artistically ambitious New Indian Cinema was not immune to a star system, which included actors such as Shabana Azmi (b. 1950), Smita Patil (1955–1986), and Naseeruddin Shah (b. 1950) (all rising to prominence in the films of Shyam Benegal [b. 1934]). But the overwhelming significance of the Indian film star became most apparent in the mid-1970s, when Bachchan's status as an "angry young man" demonstrated the importance that a single charismatic actor could have for an entire industry. Bachchan's massive popularity defined an era and a new kind of hero through a series of blockbuster films. Following Bachchan's decade-long reign, younger male stars, including Shah Rukh Khan (b. 1965), Aamir Khan (b. 1965), and Hritik Roshan (b. 1974), often represent a globalized and commercial youth culture, while recent female stars such as Madhuri Dixit (b. 1967) and Aishwarya Rai (b. 1973) continue to represent the tension between traditional Indian values and feisty, often erotic, independence.

The popularity of film stars has also led to prominent political careers, especially in Tamil Nadu, where the Tamil film superstars Shivaji Ganesan (1927–2001), Jayalalitha, and M. G. Ramachandran (1917–1987) (known as MGR) balanced film and political careers for decades, frequently blurring their on-and offscreen roles. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telegu cinema superstar N. T. Rama Rao (NTR; 1923–1996) enjoyed a similar career. Some Hindi film stars, including Bachchan, have also dabbled in politics, often controversially, but with less long-term success than that of their South Indian counterparts.

THE STATE AND CINEMA

Although some film stars succeeded in politics, popular Hindi cinema has had an uneasy relationship with the Indian state. The resistance to state-imposed Hindi in education, public administration, radio, and television starkly contrasts with the commercial Hindi cinema's pan-Indian popularity and national status. This is even more significant in the case of Hindi film song lyrics, which are embraced across both linguistic and class boundaries, including the privileged, English-speaking upper echelons, who otherwise typically disdain popular cinema.

State-controlled radio's bid to exclude Hindi film music failed, but historically the state's efforts to regulate the industry through taxation and censorship, though contentious, have been more successful. The Motion Picture Association of India (IMPA), the official body representing industry interests, has consistently but unsuccessfully negotiated for lower taxes. A few low-budget artistic films and occasionally a popular feature film deemed "educational" might receive exemption from the stiff entertainment tax, but a certification by the Censor Board is mandatory for all general theater film releases and appears onscreen. The state assumes moral regulatory authority, insisting on cutting what it deems inappropriate representations of sexuality and violence as well as overtly political content. Hindi cinema has devised awkward strategies to circumvent censorship related to sexuality, creating its own unusual conventions, reminiscent of Hollywood films produced under the Production Code. A ban on screen kissing initially derived from the British censorship code was subsequently accepted by the industry in a curious mode of self-regulation that contrasts with the erotically charged "wet sari" scenes common in song sequences. Standing in for the kiss or intimate love scenes, lyrics, gestures, and body movements creatively suggest the erotics of romance and desire. The Indian state's role as an arbiter of morality and taste is most clearly seen in the patronage it offered cinema through the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), a financial and distribution platform established in 1960 (reconstituted as the National Film Development Corporation, an amalgamation of the FFC and the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation in 1980), and the Film and Television Institute of India, a training school set up in 1961. Together these contributed to the emergence of art cinema in India suited almost exclusively to the taste and sensibility of the Indian literati.

ART CINEMA

In the 1950s Satyajit Ray's films placed regional Bengali cinema (received as Indian cinema) on the international map, and although other Bengali filmmakers, such as Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, shared some of the national attention, Ray's international status gave him undisputed standing as the master of this cinema. The three films of Ray's Apu trilogy—Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1957), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959)—derive their strength from Ray's ability to create indelible moments from a naturalistic, understated style and simple narrative. Each film forces Apu to confront painful losses, which are offset by moments of quiet joy. Critics praised the films for their universal humanism, whereas the former Bombay star Nargis, serving as a member of Parliament, famously denounced Ray for "exporting images of India's poverty for foreign audiences." In 1970 an official art cinema developed in India, helped in no small part by state subsidies and promotion at international film festivals. A handful of directors emerged, filling the space occupied almost exclusively by Ray in the two preceding decades. A pan-Indian and growing middle class expanded Ray's audience beyond Bengal, and in 1977 he made Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) for a national audience.

Subsequently, other art film directors who emerged in the 1970s created a distinct niche in Indian cinema termed "New," "Parallel," or "Art" cinema. Subsequently, other art film directors emerged in the 1970s—Govind Nihalani, Ketan Mehta, Saeed Mirza, M.S. Sathyu, and the most notable among them, Shyam Benegal. Benegal's trilogy Ankur (Seedling, 1974), Nishant (Night's End, 1975) and Manthan (The Churning, 1976) marked the beginning of the twenty-odd feature films he went on to direct. Art cinema's financing, distribution, aesthetics, and audience were in sharp variance with popular cinema. Eschewing popular cinema's musical and melodramatic formulas, the new cinema embraced realism in terse dramatic narratives that were often exposés of corruption among powerful rural landlords, urban industrialists, politicians, or law enforcement authorities. Although its output was a small fraction of that of popular cinema, art cinema received disproportionate attention in part because of its influential consumers, the Indian literati and middle class, but also because its novelty generated genuine enthusiasm in film critics. Critical commentary on cinema emerged along with this cinema, marking the beginnings of Indian cinema literature. Unfortunately, this literature polarized the relationship between popular and art cinema and favored the latter. During the 1990s state subsidies for art cinema diminished considerably, and the search for commercial success led some directors to pay closer attention to popular cinema, at times even adopting its aesthetic strategies.

By the 1990s art cinema had become repetitive and somewhat stagnant and began to morph under the influence of new entrants—diasporic filmmakers, some of whom were second-and third-generation Indians located in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These films' central theme is the cultural dislocation created by migration to the metropolitan centers in the postcolonial era of accelerated globalization. If Ray was the precursor to a broader art cinema that took off in the 1970s, the antecedent to the generation of diasporic filmmakers is Merchant-Ivory Productions—the combined effort of the producer Ismail Merchant (1936–2005), from India, the director James Ivory (b. 1928), from the United States, and the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b. 1927), of Polish-German descent, who together have made films about Indo-British encounters during and after the mid-1960s using a more or less fixed ensemble of Indian and British actors. Diasporic cinema since the late 1980s has focused instead on the experiences of middle-and working-class immigrants in their host countries, in particular the ways in which they negotiate cultural distance from the homeland. The audience is both the Indian diaspora and the middle class, a section of which dwells in both domains. Although the quality of these films varies, some auteurs stand out: Srinivas Krishna (b. 1913) and Deepa Mehta (b. 1950) in Canada, Gurinder Chadha (b. 1966) and Hanif Qureshi (b. 1954) in the United Kingdom, and Mira Nair (b. 1957) in the United States. Some auteurs have forged international collaboration around financial investment, distribution, and even talent. In searching for their own distinctive aesthetic, some have tried to appropriate or pay homage to popular cinema by adopting its most significant insignia, the song and dance sequence, whereas others have chosen realism, comedy, or lampoon as their preferred style.

In the twenty-first century, some in Hollywood have been carefully following the lead taken by diasporic filmmakers in collaborating with the mainstream Bombay film industry. Hindi cinema and Hollywood, long functioning in parallel global markets, have begun to take stock of the mutual benefits collaboration might bring. Hollywood is driven by its interest in novelty, lower production costs, and cheaper talent, the same forces behind globalization. For the Bombay industry's new generation of filmmakers, who since the 1990s have energetically experimented with commercial cinema, this presents an opportunity to tie in new sources of international capital, especially after the spectacular losses the industry suffered in 2002, and the lure of a crossover market beyond its domestic and diasporic audience. However, some Indian filmmakers are keen to win this market on their own terms, which to them means preserving the charm, romance, and aesthetic of popular Hindi cinema.

SEE ALSO National Cinema

FURTHER READING

Barnouw, Erik, and S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Chakravarty, Sumita. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Creekmur, Corey. "Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the Last Days of Genre." In Soundtrack Included, edited by Pamela Robertson-Wojick and Arthur Knight. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Dwyer, Rachel, and Divya Patel. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Kabir, Nasreen Munni. Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema. New ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Nandy, Ashis, ed. The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Pendakur, Manjunath. Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and Consciousness. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003.

Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Revised ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Thomas, Rosie. "Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989): 11–30.

Thoraval, Yves. The Cinemas of India (1896–2000). Delhi: Macmillan India, 2000.

Vasudevan, Ravi, ed. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films As Social History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Corey K. Creekmur

Jyotika Virdi