. It ought to be straightforward to present a description of
the ‘world’s biggest film industry’, but even Indian film scholars find it difficult to come to
terms with its diversity and seeming contradictions. The biggest single mistake
that non-Indian commentators (and some Indians) make is to assume that
‘Bollywood’ is the same thing as Indian Cinema. It isn’t.Consider the sheer
size of India. Roughly as big as Western Europe (but with four times the
population), it includes two major
ethnic groups, two large and several smaller religious communities (including
the world’s third largest Muslim population) and an enormous range of languages
(several hundred). The size of the country is matched by a longstanding love
affair with cinema which creates the world’s
biggest film audience. Even though India was controlled by the British until
1947, this did not prevent the development
of ‘industrial’ film production in several Indian cities, so that by the late
1930s an Indian ‘studio system’ was in
place. By the late 1990s, India had overtaken Japan and America as the producer of the largest number of feature films per
year (800-1,000) and with an annual audience of over 3 billion at home and millions more overseas, it can also
claim to be the most popular.All of this is not disputed, but when we come to
look at the films themselves and who watches them, it gets more complicated.
India is now famous for its computer software engineers and it has always been
known for its bureaucracies (needed to organise the world’s largest democracy),
but the film industry in India is only slowly beginning to deliver the detailed
box office information on a regular basis that business commentators and film
scholars in the UK and North America have come to expect from their own
industries. There are rapid changes taking place in the Indian entertainment
business with modern multiplexes appearing in big cities – but also many
traditional cinemas in small towns in rural areas which do not have the
industry infrastructure to make data collection straightforward. So, we must be
circumspect in trying to describe the industry as it exists now – and we must
recognise that it is changing all the time.. One way to think about Indian
Cinema is to distinguish four categories (but note that these all overlap and
the boundaries between them are not fixed):
• Popular Hindi Cinema
• Regional cinemas
• ‘Art’ or ‘specialised’ cinema
• Diaspora cinema (films made by Indian filmmakers based
overseas)
We can best understand the importance of these
classifications by making two simple distinctions.
The first is between ‘popular’ and ‘art’ cinema. The massive
popular audience in India is hungry for
cheap entertainment and this is what cinema has provided.
This audience, which includes a significant
proportion of people with limited access to education,
enjoys universal genres such as action, comedy
and melodrama and more specifically ‘Indian’ stories with
spiritual/mythological themes. The typical Indian
film as viewed from outside the country may well be a three
hour spectacular ‘multi-genre’ film with six or seven extended elaborately
choreographed and costumed musical sequences.But there is also an Indian
audience for more ‘serious’ film narratives, akin to European, Japanese and
American ‘art’ cinema and indeed to more adventurous Hollywood films. This
audience is relatively small, but because the overall audience is so large,
even a small proportion means significant numbers. It tends to be an audience
concentrated in the major cities, especially in the two states with the
greatest cultural traditions, West Bengal and Kerala, and in the centres for
higher education and new technologies in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad
etc. For many years from the 1950s to the 1980s, it was the Bengali art film
director Satyajit Ray who represented Indian Cinema to the outside world. In
the 1970s Indian Cinema developed a more socially aware and more politically
orientated form of cinema, partly subsidised by public funding, which was known
as Parallel Cinema – running alongside but clearly distinguished from
mainstream cinema. Since the 1990s and the opening up of the Indian market to
private investors at home and overseas, this political cinema has gone into
decline, but to some extent the tradition of ‘socially aware’ films has been
supported by Indian filmmakers such as Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta who have
returned to India to make films using their training and experience gained in
North America (respectively the US and Canada). This ‘diaspora cinema’, often,
but not always, means art cinema.
Indian Cinema
3The second distinction (which cuts across the first) is
between Hindi Cinema
The second distinction (which cuts across the first) is
between Hindi Cinema and Regional Cinemas.
Hindi is the official language of the Union of India.
However only around 40% of Indians actually speak
Hindi. In the North of India, variations of Hindi are spoken
as a first language by the population of several states around Delhi. Other
North Indians whose first language might be Gujerati, Punjabi, Bengali etc. can
also access Hindi films, as can Urdu speakers in Pakistan. All these languages are
part of the same Indo-European group. But in the South of India, the language
family is completely different and Tamils in particular have in the past
objected very strongly to the suggestion that Hindi should be the only official
language of the country. As a result, English has been retained as India’s
second official language and in the South, the different regional language
cinemas have the support of the mass of the population.
Hindi
Cinema in the South is only accessible by the more educated
part of the population and Hindi films are
distributed in a similar way to Hollywood films – i.e.
available only in a minority of cinemas.
To give you a sense of the range of films made in India,
here is a breakdown of films
in different languages for 2003 (the latest date available)
taken from the website of
the Central Board of Film Certification (the Indian
equivalent of the BBFC).
Hindi: 222
Tamil: 151
Telugu: 155
Kannada: 109
Malayalam: 64
Bengali: 49
Marathi: 25
English: 23
Assamese: 17
Others: 62
Total: 877
The four Southern film industries in Tamil Nadu, Andrha
Pradesh (Telugu), Karnataka
(Kannada) and Kerala (Malayalam) produce more than half the
total number of Indian
films. This isn’t surprising because the South has more
cinemas and a higher per capita
cinema attendance than the North.So, where is Bollywood in
all this? The term ‘Bollywood’, which is often taken to be a contraction of
‘Bombay Hollywood’, is a fairly recent term as used by film scholars and film
industry commentators. It is still criticised as meaningless by some, but it
began to circulate from the 1980s onwards and is now widely used in India and
across the world.
Bollywood is much like Hollywood in the number of films it
produces – around 200 per year (i.e. the main component in the Hindi total
above). It is also like Hollywood in that its films tend to have the highest
media profiles, sometimes the biggest budgets and stars and a reputation for
‘modern’ entertainment values. The crucial difference between Bollywood and its
regional competitors is that Bollywood has created an artificial culture that
appeals to a specific audience found across India – whereas the regional
cinemas are firmly rooted in their own language and culture. It wasn’t always
the case that the big budget Hindi films (originally produced in studios in
Calcutta and Pune as well as Bombay) were divorced fromsocial reality. Indeed,
the ‘social film’ was
once an important genre. It was the success of big action
pictures such as Sholay (1975)
that started the trend towards multi-genre pictures, which
increasingly began to draw
on Western modes of presentation. In 1998 the very
successful Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was
described by some critics as being influenced by MTV and
Western youth culture references.
This trend towards a less social realistic cinema and one
more associated with consumerist
fantasy was also associated with the rise of the NRI
(Non-Resident Indian) audience in the
UK and North America. This audience is able to pay much
higher ticket prices than those in
India (where some tickets are still below 50p) and this
income from exports helps Bollywood
producers to offset box-office flops at home.The export of
films has been a feature of Indian Cinema for a long time. Indian films have
been shown in the UK since the late 1940s and by the 1970s there was a circuit
of cinemas regularly showing Hindi films
in the UK to eager audiences (see Tyrrell 1998). This market
then transferred to video until the return of
Hindi films in UK multiplexes in the 1990s. In Africa, the
Middle East and many other territories, Hindi films have long competed with
Hollywood and Hong Kong for popular audiences. This has usually meant low
ticket prices, but here too there is a move towards higher prices in newer
cinemas where an NRI audience might exist (e.g. in Kenya, South Africa and the
Gulf States).The ‘artificiality’ of Bollywood is partly to do with its
production practices. Its films are made in Hindi in Mumbai where the local
language is Marathi and where there is also a Marathi regional cinema industry.
Spectacular dance sequences are often filmed in ‘exotic’ locations that are
beautiful or famous, rather than because the location has any relevance in the
narrative. So the locations may be in any part of India, the pyramids in Egypt,
Mauritius, Switzerland, Scotland and, increasingly now, London. NRI audiences
are now coming to terms with representations of London that appear strange to
UK audiences. More importantly perhaps Bollywood films have tended not to
specify where a story is set or to refer directly to Indian politics or
religious/cultural differences. This way they are more escapist and les potentiallydisturbing.
In the South, popular films are more recognisably ‘about’
local culture. For a long time, audiences in the
states of Andrha Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have been aware of a
very close relationship between film
and politics – but in a uniquely Indian way. Some of the
biggest film stars in these states have also been
politicians and film fan clubs have often been political
organisations as well. The popularity of some
regional films is such that they can sometimes bypass
Bollywood films at the box office, just by selling
tickets in their home state. In 2005, the biggest box office
film in India was Chandramukhi made in Tamil
and featuring Rajnikanth, India’s biggest star. Rajnikanth
is now 57 and he has decided to work on only
one film at a time. His 2007 film Shivaji looks likely to be
India’s biggest box office title of the year again.
It was the first non-Bollywood Indian film to make the UK
Top Ten, even though it only played on 12
screens. Although Tamil films do find an audience overseas,
this is mostly in countries like Malaysia and
Singapore, but DVD has made it easier to reach the Tamil diaspora
across the world (around 12 million
with a home market of around 65 million -- larger than the
UK market).
Tamil films are made in Chennai (formerly Madras), which is
also a location for some of the films made
in Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Chennai plays a major role
in post-production, including services
used by Bollywood and it can make a claim to be the real
Indian film capital, ahead of Mumbai. Much as
in Europe in the 1920s, South Indian films are often made in
two language versions (i.e. Tamil and Teluguthere are over 75 million Telugu
speakers). This relationship also extends to Bollywood, so that Tamil/Telugu
films may be dubbed into Hindi for distribution in North India and Hindi films
may be dubbed into the Southern languages. Remakes are also common between the
regional cinemas themselves and with Bollywood. Chandramukhi (described by IMDB
as a omedy/Fantasy/Horror/Musical/Romance) was a bigger budget remake of a
Malayalam film.
The four South Indian regional cinemas together constitute a
major film industry which can compete
with Bollywood. Regional cinemas outside the South tend to
be smaller and not to have such a large
production base. In cultural terms, Bengali cinema is still
important and films made in Bhojpuri, a variation
of Hindi (its linguistic roots are contested) widely spoken
in Bihar and surrounding states, have sometimes
proved to be very popular. The Indian film industry is
always changing and as traditional cinemas close in the South and more
multiplexes open, there may be a shift towards Bollywood. But the South is
building multiplexes too and it is worth noting that Hollywood distributors
have started to release films in India dubbed into several languages. In 2007,
Spider Man 3 did very well in Chennai (opening on a digital print in a new
multiplex) and the narration for the film March of the Penguins was dubbed into
Telugu and Tamil as well as Hindi.For many commentators, and many Indian film
fans, the most interesting filmmaker in India is Mani Ratnam. He began writing
and directing in 1983, making films in Kannada and Malayalam as well as Tamil,
his native language. He mostly produces his own films and in 1987 Nayakan,
a ‘Godfather-like’ take on Tamil crime and celebrity was a
big regional hit. But it was in
1992 with Roja, the first of a trilogy of romance films
firmly rooted in political issues, that Mani
Ratnam became a national figure with a film that has since
been seen as marking a turning
point in Indian Cinema.Roja was a Tamil film, dubbed into
Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi as well as Hindi.
The Hindi version was a big hit and changed Ratnam’s career.
Roja contradicted
assumptions about regional films and their appeal to
Bollywood audiences. The title refers
to a young village woman in Tamil Nadu, who finds herself
married to a middle-class man working in military software. (The man was
supposed to marry her sister, but recognising that the older sister was in love
with someone else, chose the younger.)
When the husband is sent on a mission to help the Indian
Army in Kashmir fighting separatists, the young wife insists on going with him
and when her husband is kidnapped, she does everything she can to goad the
authorities into getting him back alive.Roja takes Tamil cinema out of the
South and shows a national audience a real ‘national issue’, presented in the
universal story of a young, uneducated village woman up against political and
military authorities
and ‘human’ ‘freedom fighters’ dealing with a captive who is
by no means prepared to lie low. The film
is exciting with high quality widescreen photography by
Santosh Sivan from Kerala, one of the most
distinguished cinematographers (and directors) in India, and
music by A. R. Rahman, another Southerner
who has since become internationally famous. After Roja and
its focus on Kashmiri
separatism, Ratnam turned to the equally contentious issue
of ‘communalism’ – the
conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. Bombay (1995)
sees a Hindu man and
a Muslim woman marrying and because of hostility in their
village, moving to Mumbai
where two children are born and the family is happy in a
more secular atmosphere. But after
the attack on a mosque in Ayodhya (a real event with
repercussions across India), the
family are torn apart during communal riots. Although
structured as a traditional melodrama/
romance, the social issue is paramount. As one contributor
to the IMDB entry on the film puts
it: “An underlying moral of thinking of oneself as an Indian
rather than a Hindu or a Muslim is
prevalent throughout the latter part of the film”.Bombay was
still a Tamil film, subsequently dubbed into Hindi and again a national
success. In 1998 Mani Ratnam made his first Hindi film, still with his South
Indian creative team of A. R. Rahman and Santosh Sivan, but this time with
Bollywood superstar Sharukh Khan in the lead. Dil Se is in some ways the
reverse of Roja, featuring a romance between an All-India Radio reporter
(Sharukh Khan) and a young woman (Manisha Koirala) he meets fleetingly on a
railway platform. The reporter follows the woman to Assam in North East India
where she is revealed as a ‘freedom fighter’ – and where the couple fall in
love. In the final section of the film, the action moves to New Delhi where the
reporter faces an arranged marriage and the freedom fighter plans to disrupt
the celebrations on India’s National Day (in 1997, the
50th anniversary of India’s independence).Sharukh Khan’s
presence should have guaranteed a box office hit, but the film did poorly in
India, despite being dubbed into Telugu and Tamil. However, overseas it was a
big hit with NRI audiences, becoming the first Bollywood film to make the UK
Top 10. Its breathtaking musical sequences included the song ‘Chai Chaiyya,
Chaiyya’, performed on top of a moving train and perhaps the Indian film song
sequence that is best known outside India. (Andrew Lloyd Weber recruited Rahman
to work on Bombay Dreams after seeing this sequence and the song was used by
Spike Lee in his 2006 film Inside Man.) The income from the NRI audience
compensated for the Indian failure and Mani Ratnam has gone on to make further
hits in both Tamil Cinema and Bollywood. In 2004 he made the same film twice,
once in Tamil and again in Hindi (as Yuva) using separate casts of leading
stars. In 2007 his Hindi film Guru, a fictionalised biopic of an Indian
entrepreneur has been a big hit. The casting of this film points to the
national and global impact of Ratnam’s work. The leads are played by Abhishek
Bachchan, (the new star who is the son of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan)
and his real-life partner, the South Indian Aishwarya Rai, the former Miss
India and global icon of L’Oréal. The third lead is played by Ratnam’s own
discovery, the former Tamil
TV star Madhavan. Guru opened worldwide on the same day, led
by a big North American premiere in
Toronto.
Image : Bombay (1995)
Indian Cinema
7Deepa Mehta’s Trilogy
Women have found it difficult to get the chance to direct in
most film industries but Mira Nair,
Women have found it difficult to get the chance to direct in
most film industries but Mira Nair, Gurinder
Chadha in the UK and Deepa Mehta have all made headlines
with films set in India, which have in
different ways created a dialogue with Indian cinema.
Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) is perhaps
closest to Bollywood popular cinema whilst Nair’s films such
as Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding
and The Namesake offer a range of approaches to more serious
but still mainstream filmmaking. Deepa
Mehta is arguably closer to the concept of Indian parallel
cinema in her ‘elemental trilogy’ of Fire, Earth
and Water. Mehta was born and educated in India but learned
her filmmaking in Canada and her films
are Canadian/Indian co-productions.
Fire (1996) introduced Mehta’s controversial approach,
dealing with a marriage going wrong and a
subsequent lesbian affair between sisters-in-law played by
Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi (an iconic
figure in the parallel cinema of the 1970s and 80s). The
film struck out against traditional Hindu ideas
about marriage and family and the provocative presentation
of sexual relationships was made worse
for some audiences by references to Hindu mythology. Earth
(1998) focuses on the communal violence
at the time of partition and independence in 1947. Although
this film stirred up strong emotions about a
period of history that some would prefer not to re-visit,
the controversy promoted by the third film in the
trilogy, Water, was much greater.
Filming on Water began in India in 2000, but was abandoned
when the shoot was attacked by fundamentalist Hindus outraged by its subject
matter. The story concerns a child bride (aged
about eight) in the 1930s, who is suddenly widowed. Local
custom sees her sent to a ‘house of widows’ where she will be expected to
remain for the rest of her life. Again, the film was
seen as attacking traditional Hindu beliefs (although, of
course, it had yet to be completed). Mehta lost some of her funding and her
cast (Das and Azmi again), who were committed to other
films. She herself made a different film,
Bollywood/HollywoWomen have found it difficult to get the chance to direct in
most film industries but Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha in the UK and Deepa Mehta
have all made headlines with films set in India, which have in
different ways created a dialogue with Indian cinema.
Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) is perhaps
closest to Bollywood popular cinema whilst Nair’s films such
as Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding
and The Namesake offer a range of approaches to more serious
but still mainstream filmmaking. Deepa
Mehta is arguably closer to the concept of Indian parallel
cinema in her ‘elemental trilogy’ of Fire, Earth
and Water. Mehta was born and educated in India but learned
her filmmaking in Canada and her films
are Canadian/Indian co-productions.
Fire (1996) introduced Mehta’s controversial approach,
dealing with a marriage going wrong and a
subsequent lesbian affair between sisters-in-law played by
Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi (an iconic
figure in the parallel cinema of the 1970s and 80s). The
film struck out against traditional Hindu ideas
about marriage and family and the provocative presentation
of sexual relationships was made worse
for some audiences by references to Hindu mythology. Earth
(1998) focuses on the communal violence
at the time of partition and independence in 1947. Although
this film stirred up strong emotions about a
period of history that some would prefer not to re-visit,
the controversy promoted by the third film in the
trilogy, Water, was much greater.Filming on Water began in
India in 2000, but was abandoned
when the shoot was attacked by fundamentalist Hindus
outraged by its subject matter. The story concerns a child bride (aged about
eight) in the 1930s, who is suddenly widowed. Local
custom sees her sent to a ‘house of widows’ where she will
be expected to remain for the rest of her life. Again, the film was seen as attacking
traditional Hindu beliefs (although, of course,
it had yet to be completed). Mehta lost some of her funding
and her cast (Das and Azmi again), who were committed to other films. She
herself made a different film, Bollywood/Hollywo
The success of Mani Ratnam’s films and the limited, but
noticeable, impact of the films of Mira Nair
and Deepa Mehta and others has had an effect on Bollywood.
Rang De Basanti (2006) is one sense a
traditional Bollywood film. It has several spectacular
musical sequences (composed by A R Rahman, who
also composed music for Water) and a familiar mix of action
and romance. Like many Bollywood films
it borrows from Hollywood. One scene refers to the 1955 film
Rebel Without A Cause which introduced
James Dean, the great rebel figure of late Classical
Hollywood. Rang De Basanti is a ‘youth’ film, even
if its star Aamir Khan was already over 40 when he played an
ageing university student. (This kind of
casting also figures in Yuva and in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.)But
Rang De Basanti is also something new. The plot sees a young English woman
travelling to India to
make a documentary drama about a group of young Indians who
fought against the British in the 1930s.
She has the diaries of her grandfather (, a British officer
responsible for the capture and execution of the
rebels) but no budget to speak of. Her (female) friend in
India finds her a group of mainly rich middle class students who could play the
lead roles. These young men are prepared to help, but have little interest in
the characters. They can’t see why anyone would be prepared to die for India.
Eventually they do become
involved with their characters, but the narrative takes a
major turn when the group become personally
involved in the controversy surrounding the death of a young
Indian Air Force pilot in a flying accident.
They know the pilot and two of them have fathers implicated
in a scandal about maintenance contracts in
the Air Force. Suddenly, they find themselves fighting the
government and military authorities for real.
Made by Rakesh Omprakash Mehra, better known as a director
of (internationally acclaimed) advertising
films, Rang De Basanti is exciting and entertaining. As a
‘political film’ it is perhaps rather far-fetched,
even silly, but even so it prompted popular audiences to
think about important issues such as corruption
in government and to learn something about their nation’s
history. Although not ‘realist’ in its setting, it
does focus on real social issues and in this sense offers a
kind of response to both Mani Ratnam and
Deepa Mehta. Rang De Basanti was funded by UTV, one of the
newer Bollywood companies with ideas
much more in tune with Hollywood and at the forefront of joint
ventures with Hollywood companies,
including M. Night Shayamalan’s 2008 blockbuster The
Happening, made with 20th Century Fox
Source :
cornerhouse.org
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