THE MANY WORLDS OF INDIAN CINEMA
The growing body of research of a new generation of film scholars is uncovering unexpected treasures from the B and C filmmaking circuits of the
The official celebrations of 100 years of Indian cinema are now over. There has been much to celebrate in this remarkable story: Tales of brave experimentation, inspired patriotism, and a unique form of cinema that has stood its ground against Hollywood and that has, in recent years, been developing new forms with energy and intelligence. But throughout 2013, we have been hearing, both in India and internationally, the same old story about Indian cinema history.
Now it is 2014, I suggest it is time to sit up and take stock and start to tell more—and different kinds of— stories about India’s many cinemas. Today, with the rise of online archives and digitisation, the resources are here to expand the picture, if we are prepared to look and listen. Already there are important initiatives out there, from festivals such as Experimenta, which have uncovered unexpected treasures from experimental filmmakers throughout the decades, to the growing body of research of a new generation of film scholars, who are excavating wherever they can, including the myriad pleasures of India’s B and C circuits over the years. We don’t need to waste time arguing over which version of this history is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We simply need to recognise that there are many different fascinating stories to be told, and it is time we allowed these to be heard within a more multi-stranded narrative.
Firstly, the question of origins. While Dadasaheb Phalke was undeniably a brilliant pioneer with the inspired ambition to produce a ‘national’ cinema and to innovate with the new technology, it is well known that many other people around the country were experimenting with film technologies at the start of the last century. According to the well-oiled rumours of old Calcutta, photographer Hiralal Sen had more than a dozen films under his belt by 1913, including a two-hour Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves, a film version of an evergreen musical hit of the Calcutta stage, that released in 1903. If true, this would make it the world’s first Arabian Nights film as well as India’s first feature film. As all Sen’s films were destroyed in a fire in 1917, we will never know the truth. And ultimately, who was ‘first’ really doesn’t matter.
But what if Hiralal Sen’s 1903 feature film did exist? What if Ali Baba, not Raja Harishchandra, was Indian cinema’s first feature film? What if India’s first celluloid hero was not a noble royal from the Hindu epics but a feckless young woodcutter from a quasi-Arabian, quasi-European orientalist tale? Rather than beginning with a forty-- minute Hindu myth, Indian cinema history would kick off with a two-hour, culturally confusingly, hybrid tale from the Arabian Nights, set within an Islamic fantasy world and keying into global orientalist obsessions at the high point of cosmopolitan modernity. Crucially, this would stress Indian cinema’s interconnectedness with world cinema and culture, not its exotic difference. And framing Indian cinema in this way would allow other landmarks and trends to come into view.
A history of Indian cinema that focuses primarily on the mythological in the silent era and socials thereafter misses much else besides. After the mid-1920s, the majority of silent films produced in India were costume, fantasy and stunt films. Many of the earliest talkies were Arabian Nights- based fantasies. And while the 1950s is rightly remembered as the golden age of sublime
auteurs such as Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy, costume and fantasy films—alongside mythologicals—were a mainstay of the B-circuits and among the top hits of the day.
They boasted of innovative special effects, magic, lusty fights, ‘oriental’ dance and melodious music and gorgeous stars. Just watch Homi Wadia’s 1956 superhit Hatimtai or his 1952 Aladdin starring the tenderly beautiful young Meena Kumari. Crucially, Indian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s was not homogeneous. The spirit of cosmopolitan, visceral, lowbrow, popular culture that had been the hallmark of much pre-independence cinema, was kept alive within the B-circuit throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Indian films have always been simultaneously ‘Indian’ and in touch with the global.
A history of Bombay cinema that acknowledges the B-circuit magic and fighting films—a cinema of aam
aadmi— would bring to our attention the crucial role played by these lower-brow forms in the rise of the bigbudget masala film in the 1970s. The spectacle, action and magic of the B-circuit movies were all greedily incorporated within the conventions of the mega- masala films that ruled the box office of that decade.
When I first came to Mumbai in 1980, there were almost no archival or academic resources to build my research on and I met with astonishment on all fronts that anyone would want to study Bombay cinema (or ‘Hindi cinema’ as it was then called—usually disparagingly—long before the moniker ‘Bollywood’ took root). I started to acquire my own collection of film song-books and dialogue cassettes from the ubiquitous pavement vendors and small street stalls. I visited the cinema twice or thrice a week (there were no
VHS tapes); I watched Doordarshan’s Sunday night movie and its film song show Chitrahaar with determined regularity; and gradually I made my way into the industry, watching first-hand how films were made. I visited the productions of directors and producers as contrasting as Kamal Amrohi, Manmohan Desai, Subhash Ghai, Raj Kapoor, Raj Khosla, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Ramsay brothers, Mohan Segal and Homi Wadia. I saw as many differences as similarities in how individual filmmakers worked. Yet little of this diversity is recognised in most accounts today, which tend to dismiss all popular cinema as ‘cut and paste’. Oral histories need to be recorded before this era— like others before it—is beyond the reach of living memory.
While the Indian cinema archive is notorious for its gaps and irrevocable acts of destruction and neglect, it is nevertheless growing exponentially today, as the very concept of what an archive might be and should contain is transformed as the digital opens new doors. Different forms of collections are emerging across a plethora of sites, both within public institutions and among private collectors: Material ignored by the official state archives in the 1970s and 1980s now has commercial as well as academic value. There is still a wealth of resources out there to be tapped—and fed. If the richness of Indian cinema history is to be kept alive—in an era in which the young increasingly see history as irrelevant in the face of the cacophony of images, voices and sounds of the ever-online present—we need to encourage all such initiatives. For we can only properly understand the present moment—in all its fullness and complexity—if we remain alert to its excitingly more complicated past.