Cinema—India

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Cinema of India Summary

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Cinema—India

Cinema was introduced in India on 7 July 1896 when the Lumière brothers invited the residents of Mumbai (Bombay) to see their movies brought from France. In the next few years, Indian entrepreneurs flooded India with foreign motion pictures, which were actually of little interest to the Indian masses. It was Dhundhiraj Phalke, a young Brahman student of drawing, painting, and photography, who pawned his wife's ornaments to make the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, a mythological tale with titles in Hindi and English, which opened in Mumbai on 12 April 1913. In the next few years, Phalke made other mythological films, as well as animated films, travelogues, and documentaries. Indian tycoons such as J. F. Madan in Calcutta were responsible for a prodigious output of both social and mythological films in the following years. In spite of the popularity of Indian films, because of higher production values and a superior distribution system, about 85 percent of the movies shown in India by the late 1920s were American, a fact that dismayed both Indian filmmakers and British rulers.

Talking pictures came to India on 14 March 1931 with the showing of Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara, a drama based on a stage play. Another important force in the 1930s was the Prabhat Film Company and its leader, V. Shantaram, who showed a Hindi film, Amar jyoti (Eternal Light), about the vengeance of women, at the Venice Film Festival in 1936 and won an award at that festival for his Marathi film Sant tukaram (Saint Tukaram) a year later. From the beginning, however, Hindi emerged as the dominant language of Indian cinema, although films in other languages of more limited reach, such as Bengali and Tamil, were also made. Building on the indigenous entertainment of India, every film included a multitude of songs, which rapidly evolved from folk music to a distinctive film song genre with its own emotional identity. The film song gradually became a separate source of entertainment, and the popularity of the songs, which were often released before the movie, determined the success of the movie. Given the importance of the film song and the difficulty of finding actors who were also good singers, by the 1940s the "playback" system had become universal, and the actors mouthing the songs on screen were not the actual singers. The most famous of these playback singers is Lata Mangeshkar, who became the world's most recorded singer in her fifty-year career, which began in 1948.

Indian Cinema Since Independence

With the independence of India and the partition of the subcontinent in August 1947, Indian cinema continued its development free of British censorship but subject to the censors and taxation rules of the new Indian government. The 1950s in Mumbai were marked by the filmmaker Raj Kapoor (1924–1988), whose films were mostly scripted by the famous film journalist K. A. Abbas (1914–1987). Kapoor, through his depiction of the lovable vagabond in films, such as Awara (Vagabond) and Shri 420, became famous not only in India, but also in the Soviet Union and the Middle East. In 1957, ten years after independence, another famous director, Mehboob Khan (1906–1964), made Mother India, one of the most popular films ever made in India, in which the Indian woman as mother becomes a symbol for the nation. It was nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign film.

More than half of all the cinema halls in India were in South India, however, and therefore Madras soon became the film capital of India. Most of the films in Madras were made in Tamil, but many were made in Hindi also, such as the 1948 blockbuster, Chandralekha. The Tamil cinema also had a strong connection with South Indian politics because the famous Tamil film actor M. G. Ramachandran (1917–1987, known as MGR) became chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu and was succeeded in that position by the actress Jayalitha.

The New Cinema

Although K. A. Abbas in 1954 made the Hindi film Munna, the first Hindi film without any songs or dances, it was in Calcutta that a new kind of Indian cinema arose. There Satyajit Ray (1921–1992), a young advertising man who had been active in the Calcutta Film Society, determined to make a film that would deserve worldwide acclaim. With a small subsidy from the state of Bengal, Ray made a film based on a famous Bengali novel about a boy named Apu who grew up in a small village. The film Pather panchali (Song of the Road) was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and became the first Indian film to achieve extensive U.S. distribution. Ray completed the Apu trilogy with Aparajito (The Unvanquished) in 1957 and Apur sansar (The World of Apu) in 1959. During the centennial of the birth of Rabindranath Tagore, India's only Nobel Prize winnerin literature, Ray made a documentary on Tagore in 1961 and followed that with two films based on Tagore's literary works, Charulata, about a lonely wife in nineteenth-century Bengal; and Two Daughters, a film based on Tagore's short stories. Another Ray trilogy in the early 1970s dealt with the Calcutta middle class in the turbulent 1960s: Days and Nights in the Forest (Aranyer Din Raatri, 1969), The Adversary (Pratidwandi, 1970), and Company Limited (Seemabaddha, 1971). Ray stayed far away from the Mumbai stereotypes: no songs and dances, careful scripting, strong emphasis on authenticity, shooting on location, and careful selection of actors, who were often inexperienced. But Ray also worked with master actors, whom he had mainly discovered himself. Soumitra Chatterjee, who played the adult Apu in Apur sansar, worked with Ray for more than three decades, and Sharmila Tagore, Apu's wife in that film, appeared in Ray films throughout the 1960s. Except for Shatranj ke khilari (The Chess Players), which he made in Hindi-Urdu, all of Ray's films were in his native Bengali. Ray's prodigious output continued until his death in 1992, soon after receiving an honorary Academy Award in his Calcutta hospital bed.

Large movie billboards such as this one in Madras are a common way of advertising films in India. (HANS GEORG ROTH/CORBIS)

The first Hindi movie of the new Indian cinema was made by another famous Bengali director, Mrinal Sen (b. 1923). The film was Bhuvan Shome (1969), and its moderate success was a harbinger of a new cinema movement that was vigorous for more than two decades. Actors and directors graduated from the Film Institute in Pune and with the help of state subsidies made some good movies, such as 27 Down in 1973, which, like Bhuvan Shome, had a railroad theme. The most prominent director of the new Indian cinema was probably Shyam Benegal (b. 1934), whose 1973 film Ankur (The Seedling), about the cruelty of landlords, was followed by Mandhan (The Churning), a film about exploitation of farmers by a dairy owner that was financed by Gujarati farmers.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, in spite of vigorous production in regional centers like Madras, Mumbai continued its dominance and became universally known as Bollywood, a contraction of Bombay (Mumbai's former name) and Hollywood. After the often violent films starring superheroes such as Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood in the late 1980s saw the rise of romantic musical films. The trend in musicals culminated with the hugely popular 1994 film Hum aap ke hain kaun (Who Are We to You?), which chronicles typical family events instead of including the typical movie plots and subplots. Emigrants from South Asia all over the world—via Indian movie theaters, VCRs, DVDs, and Indian cable channels—have made Indian cinema a world cinema.