Close-up on Indian cinema

UNESCO Courier, Feb, 1989 by Khalid Mohamed

CINEMA in India is a ticket to a world of fantasy, providing an escape from the harsh reality of everyday life. Three-quarters of a century old, it is still eagerly wooing its faithful audience with stories of virtuous people battling against the odds and emerging victorious. At various stages in its history, Indian cinema has borrowed themes, ideas and even entire plots from foreign sources. It has always been heavily influenced by Hollywood, and costume epics, thrillers, love stories and family dramas from the United States have often been refashioned to suit Indian taste, which is demanding and virtually inflexible. As a rule, every film must include at least half a dozen songs and dances (although in recent years the more adventurous film makers have sought to slash this number by halo, high melodrama with a strong emotional impact, and a climactic sequence in which the hero usually destroys the villain with fists or guns.

Traditionally Indian films have a hero, a heroine and a villain. On the periphery there are a mother figure, a comedian to provide light relief, a child or teenager who will appeal to the young people in the audience, and a Muslim or a Christian character. This is the framework devised by the Bombay movie moguls and it is followed by other film-producing centres in Madras, Calcutta and the Punjab.

The father of Indian cinema was Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (1870-1944). Born into a priestly family in Nasik district, not far from Bombay, Phalke was trained to be a Sanskrit scholar, but his interests lay more in the direction of painting, theatre and magic. When he saw a film about the life of Christ, he was excited by the possibilities of the new medium. The outcome was India's first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), whose plot, drawn from Indian mythology, was a celebration of the deeds of the monarch who sacrificed his wealth, kingdom and family in his quest for truth.

Phalke became a prolific film producer whose work was popular throughout the country. Other stalwarts of the Indian silent cinema included Dhiren Ganguly, who made the satirical comedy England Returned (1921); Debaki Kumar Bose, who directed the adventure movie Kanamar Aagun (Flames of Flesh; 1928); and Chandulal Shah who made Typist Girl (1926) and Gun Sundari (Why Husbands Go Astray; 1927), both of which evoke the strength and dignity of the Indian woman.

Film making became big business as well as a medium for artistic expression. Studios and production groups such as New Theatres of Calcutta, the Prabhat Film Company of Pune (near Bombay) and Bombay Talkies were formed by entrepreneurs and dictated taste during the 1930s, the first decade of sound. One particularly active studio, the Imperial Film Company, produced India's first talking feature, Alam Ara (Beauty of tbe World; 1931, in Hindi), which included a dozen songs.

By 1940, 100 films a year were being made in India, a figure which doubled by 1950. Today, India ranks third in the total number of films produced after the United States and Japan, but since 1976 has led the world in annual film output. In 1983, 763 Indian films were made, most of them in Bombay and Madras. Current output is over 900 films a year, and despite keen competition from television and video, cinema is still India's best-loved form of entertainment.

Yet Indian cinema has not confined itself to entertainment. It has made genuine efforts to portray the Indian mind and emotions. It has advanced the theory that the good must triumph over evil, taken the side of the downtrodden, stressed the need for respect for one's elders, and portrayed the quality of honesty in a largely corrupt world. The best examples of such cinema date from the 1950s, which is generally acknowledged to have been a golden decade when film makers were not entirely dominated by box office considerations and the national mood was one of optimism and hope.

The films made in the 1950s by directors V. Shantaram, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy are today widely regarded as masterpieces. Plots were then often taken from indigenous literary sources and were rooted in Indian soil. The intention was to combine social conscience with entertainment, a difficult blend to achieve. There was also a drive to use more advanced technology.

After the 1950s, with the advent of colour, the cinema became more lighthearted and escapist. The tendency was to produce sugary love stories set in Kashmir or picturesque hill-towns such as Darjeeling. From this background emerged India's best-known film maker, Satyajit Ray.

Born in 1921 into a cultivated Bengal family, Ray was influenced in early life by the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, and by his own father Sukumar, a noted Bengali writer. He became acquainted with the French director jean Renoir when Renoir was making his film The River in Calcutta. Encouraged by Renoir, Ray started work on Pather Panchali (Song of tbe Road; 1955). This film, the first of the Apu trilogy based on novels by the Bengali writer Bibhuti Bhushan Banerji, was completed on a shoestring budget. At the 1956 Cannes film festival it was voted the "best human document" shown.