CINEMA

CINEMA The development of India's film industry—one of the world's largest—is as old, as varied, and as exciting as the history of the medium itself. The Lumière moving pictures that took Paris by storm at end of 1895 were enthralling Bombay audiences by the next July. Shooting for the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, started in 1912, coinciding with the appearance of full-length features in the United States. The first Indian "talkie" was shown in 1931, two years after the first British and French talkies made their bow.

The Early Years

At the turn of the twentieth century, when cinema dawned, India was poised for major social and political reform. Technological innovations, such as cars, planes, and gramophone records that took classical music to the masses, were transforming urban Indian society. Encouraged by the response to the first Indian films, the exhibitors moved the cinema shows to Novelty Theater and introduced a wide range of prices, appealing to both patrician and plebeian. The cheapest tickets cost four annas (a quarter of a rupee), creating the "four-anna class" audience that in decades to come would dictate the form and content of Indian commercial films.

Enterprising young Indians began to film local events (ranging from wrestling matches and extracts from plays to the return of Wrangler Paranjpye from Cambridge) with cameras imported from London. With the rise of film magnates in India like Jamshedji Framji Madan and Abdulally Esoofally, films from all over the world were jostling for a slice of the Indian market. But these stagy dramas and comics were not to the tastes of the Indian multitude. The time was ripe for a truly indigenous filmmaker.

In 1910 a depressed Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, whose partners had withdrawn financial support from his fine-art printing business seated himself in the America-Indian cinema showing The Life of Christ. This run-of-the-mill production of the silent era, however, had a magical effect on Phalke. As Phalke watched the film unfold, he had a clear vision of his goal: to re-create the world of the rich mythic lore and epic tales of India, peopled with gods, demons, and humans. A Sanskrit scholar, architect, painter, photographer, and amateur magician, Phalke was certainly equipped to do so.

Phalke was his own scriptwriter, cameraman, director and even projectionist and distributor. Raja Harishchandra, the story of a king renowned for telling the truth, took six grueling months to complete and was released commercially in May 1913. With subtitles in Hindi and English and 3,000 feet long, the film ran for an unprecedented twenty-three days, or six times the normal run of an Indian film. When Phalke finished Lanka Dahan (The burning of Lanka), his box office collections had to be hauled away in bullock carts with police escorts. Many hardheaded businessmen now stepped into the picture, churning out films in the roofless studios (or "factories") of the early years. Calcutta theater owner J. F. Madan built a chain of cinemas that covered India, Burma, and Ceylon and produced ten films a year.

After World War I, the British colonial regime appointed an Indian Cinematograph Committee of Enquiry, headed by an Indian member, Dewan Bahadur T. Rangachariar. But as many Indians feared, the British authorities were concerned mostly about expression of nationalist sentiments, banning films such as Bhakta Vidur (1921) and R. S. D. Choudhury's Wrath (1930) in which actors appeared as Mahatma Gandhi. World War II saw the tightening of censorship as never before. Even oblique references to Gandhi or other leaders brought instant censorship and reprisals.

But the silent film industry that Rangachariar so meticulously studied was itself poised for a revolutionary change. The day the committee was appointed—October 6, 1927—was also the day the world's first talkie, The Jazz Singer, premiered in New York.

The first foreign talkie in India was released by Madan Pictures in Calcutta in 1928. The first Indian talkie was made a few years later: Alam Ara, an Arabian Nights–style drama, produced by Bombay's Imperial Film Company and directed by Ardeshir Irani. Released on 14 March 1931, the first Indian talkie, with ten songs, featured Zubeida, Master Vithal, and W. M. Khan. On opening night, black-market vendors sold tickets for its premiere at twenty times their actual price.

In Bombay, sound literally changed the complexion of the film industry. Most female stars of the silent era were "Anglo-Indians," who could not handle Hindi. Even the silent era's "star of stars," Sulochana (Ruby Meyers), whose salary reportedly exceeded that of the Bombay governor, was toppled from her throne. More liberal attitudes made upper caste actresses available to the once-taboo film industry. In a 1932 version of the Harishchandra story, the female lead was played by a Brahman, Durga Khote.

For dialogue, Indian filmmakers turned to popular playwrights, such as Agha Hashr Kashmiri, who wrote ornate dialogue and flowery verses. But as filmmakers realized that a different craft was evolving, they looked to novels for original material, a practice that seems to have originated in Bengal.

Dialogue has always had a special hold over Indian audiences. Actor-director Sohrab Modi's spirited speech as a Rajput warrior in Pukar (1939) had viewers showering coins on the screen. In 1975 over half a million records of the dialogue of the "curry-western" Sholay were sold. But film songs were to become even more popular than dialogue—to the extent of acquiring more importance than the films themselves.

Songs above All

A typically Indian result of the coming of sound was the central importance that music and songs acquired in film. By the mid-1930s, movie music was big business. Indra Sabha (1932) had nearly seventy songs. In Devi Devyani, beautiful Gohar, then in her early twenties, was cast against nearly seventy-year-old Bhagwandas, a famous singer. While the predominance of songs is seen as a continuation of the essentially musical nature of Indian theater, others suggest that songs and music were a means to overcome a linguistic splintering of the Indian audience. The merry mixing of Indian and western traditions, classical and folk, was condemned by some as "hybrid" but the very vitality of film music and its desire to experiment broadened the basis of Indian music.

In film dance too, choreographers combined Western styles with distorted mudras of Indian classical dance forms. Two serious attempts to put Indian dance on film were Uday Shankar's Kalpana (Imagination, 1948) and V. Shantaram's Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (Jangle of anklets, 1955), one of the early Technicolor films in India.

The first two decades of talkies were dominated by "singing stars" like Saigal, Pankaj Mullick, Kanan Devi, Noorjehan, and Suraiyya. But good singing was no guarantee of good acting. "Playback" (or ghost) singing came to the rescue. The most successful playback singer was Lata Mangeshkar (the "Nightingale of India"), whose 30,000 solo, duet, and chorus-backed songs recorded in twenty Indian languages between 1948 and 1987 were noted in the Guinness Book of Records.

The Emergence of Studios

From the 1920s to the 1940s, film technicians and performers in India were on the payroll of a studio, making up one large joint family under its roof. The port cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta had become the major centers of commerce and industry—including film production. Major studios developed a personality of their own but by the 1930s, three had attained a prestige that set them above the rest. New Theatres in Calcutta was started by B. N. Sircar, who collected a group of talented men around him. They captured the all-India market with Devdas (1935), based on the well-known novel, directed by P. C. "Prince" Barua, who also played the (eponymous) lead role. Many Indian language versions followed.

Himansu Rai and his wife Devika Rani, who made silent films with German backing, followed with an Anglo-Indian coproduction, Karma. In 1934 the couple set up Bombay Talkies. Its products were carefully tailored to meet the tastes of its varied audiences, mixing glamour, music, and melodrama with a certain amount of political and social consciousness.

Prabhat Studios in Pune had no elitist pretensions. V. Shantaram directed a majority of its films, notably Duniya na Mane, about an elderly widower who marries a young woman, then regrets it. But Prabhat's most successful film was Sant Tukaram (Saint Tukaram), directed by Shantaram's copartners Damle and Fatehlal. Made in Marathi, it was a great success throughout India.

Inflation, unleashed by World War II, pulled out the supports of the studio system, already tottering from internal jealousies. Successful directors and actors sought to breakaway and amass personal fortunes. Fly-by-night producers with money made on shady wartime deals lured stars away to work in individual films. Leadership of the industry passed from established producers into the hands of leading stars, exacting financiers and calculating distributors/exhibitors. The masala film—which wrapped all salable ingredients together, comedy, melodrama, song, dance, romance—became the widely accepted recipe for success.

As it became economically unfeasible to shoot in the north, studios equipped for sound started coming up in the south. In 1936 Madras United Artists Corporation and Modern Theaters were both founded, soon followed by Vauhini, Gemini, AVM, and others. But till the late 1940s, most Indian cinema was blissfully unconcerned with Madras, capital of the mammoth south Indian film industry. In 1948, however, S. S. Vasan's spectacular Chandralekha, with its unforgettable drum-dance sequence, became a stunning success all over India.

At the time, almost half of all Indian theaters were in the four southern Dravidian states (Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu) and almost 50 percent of all films made were in the Dravidian languages. Most of these films were from Tamil Nadu, where films wielded a power in the social, cultural, and political spheres unequalled in India. The credit for realizing the enormous potential of the medium goes to the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) Party, which advocated a revival of Dravidian culture.

The 1947 partition of Bengal into India's West Bengal and East Pakistan threw the Calcutta film industry, which had always demonstrated political awareness, into turmoil—and politics continued to influence subsequent films. Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamul (The uprooted, 1951), on the refugee influx into partitioned India, was one such powerful drama. Activist Ritwik Ghatak, of the leftist Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) who acted in Uprooted went on to make Nagarik (Citizen) in 1952, an exhortation to the working class to keep up its struggle.

French director Jean Renoir had visited Calcutta in 1949 to scout locations for his forthcoming film River. One of his guides there was Satyajit Ray, a young graphic artist and aspiring filmmaker—who would go on to show a generation of Indian filmmakers that it was possible to be successful outside of India's film bazaar.

Satyajit Ray and Bengali Filmmaking

Metaphorically and literally Satyajit Ray towered over Indian cinema. His Pather Panchali (Song of the road, 1955) ran to packed houses in Bengal and won the Best Human Document award at Cannes. He showed aspiring filmmakers that it was possible to make a different kind of cinema with amateur actors, without make up, shoot mainly on location and interpret Indian reality in non-melodramatic style.

Rooted firmly in the literary and artistic tradition of the Bengal Renaissance, Ray had studied at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan (Abode of Peace) University. He went on to prove himself a master storyteller and observer of the human predicament in classics such as the Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959), Jalsaghar (The music room, 1958), Charulata (1964), Devi (The goddess, 1960), and Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and nights in the forest, 1969).

Another Bengali genius, Ritwik Ghatak, was a passionate practician of epic cinema, investing melodrama with tragic depth as he probed the personal and collective impact of Bengal's partition. From this pain were born his masterpieces: Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-capped star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E-flat, 1961), and Subarnarekha, (1962). Mrinal Sen graduated from his initial agit-prop essays to sensitive explorations of middle-class guilt in well-crafted films such as Ek Din Pratidin (And quiet flows the dawn, 1979), Akaler Sandhaney (In search of famine, 1980), and Kharij (The case is closed, 1982).

Uttam Kumar, who played a film star in Ray's Nayak (The hero, 1966), was long Bengal's beloved matinee hero, starring with the inimitable Suchitra Sen. Bilingual filmmakers based in Bombay, like Bimal Roy and Shakti Samanta, lured the two to act in Hindi films. Later popular Bengali stars who made it good in Hindi cinema were Sharmila Tagore and Mithun Chakravorty.

The Golden Age of Hindi Cinema

In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominance of Hindi cinema was unparalleled commercially and critically. V. Shantaram's 1957 film, Do Aankhen Bara Haath (Two eyes, twelve hands), about a benevolent jailor who tries to reform six condemned prisoners, won a Silver Bear at Berlin. Journalist-filmmaker K. A. Abbas was one of the few socially committed filmmakers of the day, his brilliant Dharti Ke Lal (Red earth) focused on the 1943 Bengal famine. When Nitin Bose and then Bimal Roy moved from Calcutta's New Theatres to Bombay, they brought their social awareness into Hindi films. Bose's Gunga Jumna (1961), about the conflict between two brothers, is among the all-time hits of Indian cinema.

Mehboob Khan, who ran away from home to become an actor, emerged as one of Bombay's most distinguished producer/directors. His most popular film, Mother India (1957), created an enduring icon of the mother as a symbol of national identity in his protagonist Radha (played by Nargis, who won India's first international acting prize at Karlovy Vary). Bimal Roy made films about social evils. Do Bigha Zamin (Two acres of land, 1953) depicting the poignancy of the peasants' losing battles against avaricious landlords won prizes at Cannes and Karlovy Vary. Memorable in the leading role was one of the great actors of Indian cinema, Balraj Sahni, an IPTA member. In Roy's 1955 version of Devdas, he cast the reigning tragedy king, Dilip Kumar, as Saratchandra's self-destructive hero.

Raj Kapoor's career coincided with the birth of a new nation state. The early Raj Kapoor, with his romanticized idealism, sought to be the bardic voice of the Nehruvian dream. When he made Awaara (The vagabond, 1955), introducing in homage to Charlie Chaplin the lovable Indian "Tramp," his tremendous appeal at home and abroad seemed endless. His songs are still sung in Russia. Kapoor and Nargis shared an electrifying screen chemistry, epitomizing romance for an entire generation of Indians.

Guru Dutt was Indian cinema's tragic poet. He had a superb understanding of the camera and a fine ear for melody. His master films, including Pyaasa (Thirsty, 1957), which delved into the despair of a poet unrecognized in his lifetime, and his autobiographical Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper flowers, 1959), have attracted a cult following.

If there is a truly Indian "genre," it is the mythological. Mythology has been a source material for Indian films right from Phalke's Harishchandra. In later years, one of the most successful "mythos" was Jai Santoshi Maa (Hail to Goddess Santoshi Maa, 1975). Cheaply made and featuring an erstwhile heroine of mainstream cinema, the film was bountifully blessed at the box office. The lives of saints was also a recurring theme in films.

Another typically Indian film genre was the costume drama of refined manners and poetical language—a seeking to evoke a golden glow of nostalgia for the Mughal court. Among the most popular were Guru Dutt's Chaudvin ka Chand (Full moon, 1960), Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah (The pure one, 1971), and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (The great Mughal, 1960).

New Heroes

The Swinging Sixties brought about a sea change. Icon of the times was Raj Kapoor's younger brother, the exuberant Shammi, who broke the mold of the traditional gentlemanly hero and won for himself the title of "Rebel Star." Reworking his earlier soulful/romantic image in the style of James Dean and Elvis Presley, sporting T-shirts and leather jackets, dancing uninhibitedly to highly hummable numbers, Shammi Kapoor led Hindi cinema's first concerted attempt to woo the Westernized teenage audience. His 1961 color film Junglee, set in picturesque Kashmir, elevated him to cult status; his exulting cry of "Yahoo" (part of the theme song) captured the imagination of a whole new generation.

Shammi Kapoor's successor was rather his opposite. He hardly conformed to India's prevailing ideal of robust Punjabi good looks, crinkled his eyes and shook his head vulnerably in what were to become trademark gestures. Yet Rajesh Khanna was dubbed India's first superstar as one sentimental romance after another swept the box office. The gallant smile with which he faced death guaranteed a collective lump in the audience's throat (Anand, 1970; Namak Haram, 1973). Coincidentally enough, the rising star who was soon to unseat Khanna was the second lead in both of these films—the lanky, brooding Amitabh Bachchan, blessed with the most seductive baritone of them all.

Bachchan became India's longest ruling star, starting with a series of author-backed roles that cast him as an angry young man. Prakash Mehra's Zanjeer (Chains, 1973) and Yash Chopra's Deewar (The wall, 1975) were great box office successes. But the curry western Sholay (Burning embers, 1975) by director Ramesh Sippy was the biggest hit, chosen in a recent British Film Institute poll as the "best Indian film."

Versions of the vigilante hero, as the upright cop fighting a corrupt system or the avenging outsider free from establishment rules, sprang up everywhere. The films reflected India's turbulent 1970s, when the Nehruvian dream of an egalitarian, secular India collapsed, followed in June 1975 by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's imposition of a "National Emergency" and the suspension of civil rights, after she was found guilty by Allahabad's High court of electoral malpractice. After the "Emergency," Amitabh Bachchan kept the film industry buoyant, delivering hit after hit, spun out by the "Masala moghul" Manmohan Desai (Amar, Akbar, Anthony, 1977), or articulating the anger of youth in Kala Patthar (Coal, 1979).

The Southern Connection

The highly politicized Tamil Nadu cinema created real-life rivals. M. G. Ramachandran's swashbuckling "Robin Hood" image won him a large fan following, which propelled him to the post of chief minister of the state. Stage thespian Sivaji Ganesan (who later joined the opposing Congress Party) wowed masses and critics alike with his matchless oratorical skills. Writers great and small, including future Chief Minister Karunanidhi, vied to pen breathless passages of prose for this new star.

The directors who rescued Tamil movies from excessive theatricality were K. Balachander and Bharatiraaja. Balachander added a psychological edge to bold themes, creating new stars such as Kamal Haasan (one of India's best actors and dancers, who went on to become a successful writer/director/producer in the 1980s and 1990s), Rajanikant (his mannerisms have a cult following, with new converts in Japan), and the talented Sridevi, whose child-woman image made her an all-India star.

Traffic between Bombay cinema and that of Madras climaxed with Mani Ratnam's Nayakan (1987), based on the life of a Bombay organized crime boss, and his 1992 Roja, a love story in the time of terrorism in Kashmir.

Andhra Pradesh's Telugu cinema was long dominated by the rivalry between the "godly" N. T. Rama Rao (or NTR) and the more down-to-earth A. Nageshwar Rao. NTR breathed declamatory fire into the Sanskritized phrases of the epic mythologicals, playing the Hindu god Krishna no fewer than seventeen times. Thanks to his godly screen presence and faithful fan following, he led a Dravidian political party, espousing Telugu identity, and became chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.

Telugu and Tamil films reveled in family melodramas, in which modernity (in the form of an educated son or daughter-in-law) threatened the idealized traditional family. That "Madras Formula" was soon applied with equal success to teary Hindi films. Telugu directors Bapu and K. Vishwanath succeeded in Bombay as well. Vishwanath's celebrated ode to Carnatic music in his Sankarabharanam (Shiva's raga, 1979) was imitated by northern directors.

Malayalam and Kannada cinema were latecomers. Like Bengal, Kerala is a stronghold of Marxism, and it boasts the highest literacy in the country. Given its thriving film culture too, it was no surprise that many acclaimed directors of art (or "parallel cinema" as it was known) came from Kerala.

A New Wave Touches Indian Shores

Ray had shown the way, and international film festivals opened the doors to worldwide developments. The government of India was alive to the needs for funding non-formula filmmakers, and the Film Finance Corporation or FFC (which was reincarnated as the National Film Development Corporation two decades later) was inaugurated in 1960. In 1961 the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) rose from the ruins, as it were, of the Prabhat Studios. A National Film Archive followed in 1964. FFC produced Bhuvan Shome (1969), an engagingly subversive work, directed by Mrinal Sen. The film marked the arrival of a "New Wave" of filmmaking on Indian shores.

Quite independent of institutional support, a southern theater group made Samskara (Funeral rites, 1970) in Kannada, an indictment of Brahman hypocrisy and meaningless ritual. The Kannada cinema now became the hub of "new cinema" developments. Eminent playwright and Rhodes scholar Girish Karnad and theater genius cum music composer B. V. Karanth made memorable films together and on their own. Soon, Girish Kasaravalli, a young pharmacist who chose to train at FTII, surged to the forefront with an accomplished first work, Ghatashraddha (The rite, 1978), which explored the anachronistic world of Brahmanical rituals, with sensitivity and integrity.

From Kerala, an early graduate of the FTII, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, is today India's most distinguished filmmaker, acclaimed nationally and internationally. On his shoulders rests the mantle of Ray. Adoor has created demanding masterpieces that explore the human condition with detachment and delicacy. Elipattayam (The rat trap), focusing on Kerala's decaying feudal society, is as disturbing today as it was in 1982, when the British Film Institute Award cited it as "the most original and imaginative film" of the year. Other filmmakers from Kerala include cartoonist turned filmmaker Aravindan, Shaji N. Karun, director of Piravi (Birth, 1988), perhaps the mostly widely seen Indian film on the international festival circuit.

In Bombay, two of Ritwik Ghatak's devoted students, Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul struck out in defense of "pure cinema," eschewing the strong narrative and emotional drama of the conventional cinema. Far less esoteric but equally experimental was FTII's Ketan Mehta whose debut film Bhavni Bhavai transposed the folk idiom to the screen.

The New Wave created its own icons to challenge mainstream melodramatics: the luminous Smita Patil, who died tragically young; the perfectionist Shabana Azmi, who combined brilliant acting with activism; the mercurial Naseeruddin Shah and the solid-yet-sensitive Om Puri, both immensely talented, both graduates of the National School of Drama and the FTII.

The director who created and projected these icons worldwide was Shyam Benegal. His early films, starting with Ankur (The seedling, 1974), are searchingly humane explorations of the conflict between feudal traditions and modernity, filtered through women placed at the heart of each drama. Benegal is a rarity in that his films do not compromise his integrity and yet pay for themselves. Benegal's cinematographer Govind Nihalani graduated to become one of India's most politically conscious directors with the hard-hitting Ardh Satya (Half truth, 1983), a study of the brutalization of an idealistic young policeman (Om Puri). Nihalani continues his explorations of violence, individual and societal; his latest big-budget Dev (2004) brings together the two most famous "cops" of mainstream and offbeat cinema: Amitabh Bachchan and Om Puri.

Political engagement is also the hallmark of another distinguished director, Saeed Mirza. His famed quartet (including Why Does Albert Pinto Get Angry?) voices the plight of the marginalized minorities. His Naseem (1994) cast poet Kaifi Azmi as the despairing Muslim patriarch who remains in India at partition because of his profound belief in India's secular ideals, only to find himself and his family threatened by the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992.

A trailblazer in this regard was M. S. Sathyu, whose 1973 Garm Hava (Hot wind) dared to look at the plight of Muslims in North India after partition. The film was a critical success—accepted at Cannes, recipient of a National Award—but did not succeed financially. Another powerful partition film was Nihalani's Tamas (Darkness), which appeared as a television serial.

The New Wave threw up new filmmaking centers with no cinematic tradition to speak of. Assam's Jahnu Barua (Halodia Choraye Baodhan Khai, 1987; Hkhagoroloi Bohu Door, 1995) carved a niche for himself, exploring the many facets of his seemingly idyllic land torn apart by ethnic strife. Barua has brought Assam into national focus, underlining the feeling of isolation. From Manipur, Aribam Syam Sarma's seemingly simple films (Imagi Ningthem, Ishanou, Sanabi) conceal many layers, with strong heroines who reflect the prevailing matrilineal system. One of Indian cinema's enduring mysteries is what happened to Nirad Mohapatra after his brilliant Maya Miriga (Illusion, 1983) a bittersweet unfolding of the disintegration of a traditional family in an Orissa township.

The vigor of the New Wave drew into its fold professionals from the sister arts, like the Pune-based theater director (and pediatrician) Jabbar Patel, who gave shape to a new Marathi cinema with his political and social dramas, Saamna (1975), Sinhasan (1979), and Umbartha (1981), starring Smita Patil as a women's rights activist. Fellow Maharashtrian and theater enthusiast Amol Palekar first became famous as the "boy next door" in Basu Chatterjee's light-hearted romances but went on to make serious films tackling unusual themes.

Talented artists from all over the country made their mark in cinema: photojournalist and theater director Gautam Ghose adopted a semidocumentary approach in many hard-hitting political films like Dakhal, Patang, and Dekha. A memorable scene in his Paar (The Crossing, 1984) has the heroic couple (Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah) herding swine across the swirling waters of the river to earn their fare back to their village. Academic poet Buddhadeb Dasgupta combined a lyrical sensibility with politically conscious humanism in films like Neem Annapurna, Bagh Bahadur, and Uttara, which won him the Best Director award in Venice in 2000.

The New Wave's liberating influence brought women filmmakers to the fore. In Bangalore, Prema Karanth's Phaniyamma (Kannada, 1982) was a moving portrayal of a child widow; Bombay-based Sai Paranjpye (Sparsh, Chashme Buddoor, Katha, and Disha) constantly sought to conquer new territory, from sensitive love stories and comedy to a journalistic look at Bombay's hopeful migrants. Noted theater director and actor Vijaya Mehta extended her formidable talents to films (Smriti Chitre, Rao Saheb, Pestonjee), and, in Calcutta, Aparna Sen grew from mainstream star to accomplished director. Her first, and India's first English film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981), was a poignant study of the loneliness of an Anglo-Indian teacher. The latest, Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2003), is a brief and tender encounter between strangers caught amidst intercommunal violence.

The Wave Recedes

Around the 1980s, India's New Wave cinema seemed to run out of steam. Over the years, the progressive agenda of the filmmakers lost its niche audience. FFC and National Film Development Corporation tried without success to set up an alternative distribution system. Many New Wave films survived on the oxygen of the festival circuit and screenings on national television. Independent cinema nevertheless lives on, with new talents joining the established. In Calcutta, the prolific Rituparno Ghosh has established himself as a sensitive director of women-centric dramas; in Kerala, Murali Nair's black satires and surreal humour have won accolades worldwide (Camera d'Or for Marana Simhasanam at Cannes). In mainstream cinema, too, a next generation arose, technically savvy and daring enough to take risks (Farhan Akhtar, Madhur Bhandarkar). Ramgopal Varma, yesterday's whiz kid from Hyderabad whose 1995 Satya (a noir thriller on the Bombay underworld) catapulted him to the top, is currently backing experiments by newer entrants.

In the 1990s, globalization raised the demon of cultural dilution and contamination. The conservative Right echoed the fears of Hindu fundamentalists, who saw the exposure to Western entertainment as detrimental to the "purity" of Indian culture. Mainstream cinema, attuned to these conservative forces, responded with two brands of patriotism: hard and soft. Soft patriotism reinforced the traditional virtues of filial obedience. Bright, glossy films increasingly courted the rich Indian diaspora settled in the West, which looked to India for its cultural identity and value system—values that were often regressive when it came to women's rights.

Hard patriotism was packaged in films like Border and Gadar (Chaos), which had a ready audience in a country hit by terrorism and militancy. The message was: how can you love your country without hating your neighbour? In the mainstream cinema, there was no place for introspection, political or social, to probe the roots of violence. Rare exceptions were Gulzar's Maachis (Matches), which explored how young men turned to terrorism under police brutalities in Punjab, and Kamala Haasan's Hey Ram! (in Tamil and Hindi), which tried to probe the roots of religious hatred at the time of partition.

Indian cinema is now looking beyond national borders. The urban success of Dev Benegal's English August (based on a first novel by a bureaucrat), the international success of Shekhar Kapoor's Bandit Queen on a notorious woman dacoit, and Aamir Khan-Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan, a film that married two of India's great passions, cricket and movies, all fueled Indian filmmakers' ambitions to capture world audiences. Meanwhile, the mushrooming of multiplexes in Indian cities has achieved what years of muddled strategies could not: creating niche audiences for small films that are made in a mix of languages. It seems that the all-India, all-in-one film has become even more of a mirage, like the R?m?ya?a's elusive golden deer.

Rani Day BurraMaithili Rao

See alsoFilm?g?t ; Film Industry ; Lata Mangeshkar ; Ray, Satyajit

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