History of the Indian Film Industry
ramnarine.ragbir
The following article was taken from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Films.
I found the article to be interesting, I don't know how accurate the
contents of this article may be, however, it may still be interesting
to some readers. Comments and corrections are welcome.
The Film industry in India
With an annual production of approximately 800 films in more than a
dozen languages, India has the world's largest and most culturally
diverse national cinema. It is also -- with the exception of the films
of Satyajit Ray_the least heralded and understood.
The Early Years
Cinema reached India on July 7, 1896, when a representative of the
Lumiere brothers en route to Australia screened several shorts at
Watson's Hotel in Bombay. Within a year, Harishchandra
Sakharam Bhatvadekar had imported a camera and shot the
first Indian-made film, a record of a wrestling match in Bombay's
Hanging Gardens. Two pioneers in the dissemination of cinema were
Jamsetji Framji Madan and Abdullaly Esoopally, among the
first owners of theater chains. But it was not until the success
Raja Harishchandra (1913), produced by Dhuniraj Govind
Phalke (better known as Dabasahep Phalke), that Indian
cinema established itself as a mass medium. The single print of
the film, which was based on India's common mythological
past, created a genre that transcended linguistic and
cultural differences. Phalke, now considered the father of
Indian cinema, incorporated special effects in order to
build upon religious sentiment. Audiences prostrated themselves
when Rama or Krishna appeared on the screen.
In the 1920s, three major genres emerged: the historical epic,
the stunt film, and the modern "social" drama. While these
genres reflected the pervasive influence of Hollywood, their
themes and structures also drew upon ancient Sanskrit theater
and its folk variants. In fact, cultural nationalism based on
traditional forms is a pervasive feature of Indian cinema.
Despite strict censorship, covert nationalist references
could be found in even the most commercial products made during
British rule. Nationalist concerns were made explicit in
some cases, such as Dhiren Ganguly's Bilet Pherot (1921),
which satirizes English-speaking Indians.
Sound and India's Linguistic Diversity
With the advent of sound, Indian cinema was forced to deal with
the nation's linguistic diversity. The first feature-length
sound film, Alam Ara (1931), was made in Bombay and
provided two solutions, in its use of songs and of Hindustani,
a composite language. The fusion of music, dance, song, and drama
was a form long established in ancient Sanskrit theater. In
conjunction with radio, India's other mass medium, film songs
became an extremely popular genre that presold sound films on the
basis of the music. One early sound film, Indra Sabha (1932),
contained some seventy songs. (During World War II, black
market investors would replace the studio system with a
formula-driven star system_"a star, six songs, and three dances"_
that continues to dominate Indian cinema.)
Hindustani, a simple but expressive language derived from
Hindi and Urdu, made possible a national cinema that could be
understood by about half the population. The three major film
production capitals were Bombay (west), Calcutta (northeast),
and Madras (south), with each center basing its production on
the local language, but also making films for adjacent
linguistic zones. Bombay was the closest of these cities to
Hindi-speaking north central India, and so it became the
chief producer of Hindi film; other centers also produced
Hindi-language features in an attempt to reach a
quasi-national market.
In 1948, the Madras feature Chandraleka, released in both
Tamil and Hindi and the most expensive film till then,
signaled a shift in dominance from Bombay to the south. Since
the late 1950s, Madras has produced more films than Bombay;
and since the late 1970s, as many films are made in Tamil,
Telugu, and Malayalam as in Hindi. Nonetheless, Madras did
little to challenge the Bombay formula or its hold on the
national market.
The New Cinema
In the decade after India gained independence from British rule
in 1947, a handful of filmmakers in Bombay made films that broke
with the escapist Hindi formula: K.A. Abbas, Bimal Roy, and Guru
Dutt. Abbas, one of several members of the progressive
Indian People's Theater Association to influence Indian
cinema, made India's first realist film,
Children of the Earth (1946), about the recent
Bengali famine, and the first Hindi film without songs or
dance, The Lost Child (1954). It was in West Bengal, however,
that the international success of Satyajit Ray signaled the
emergence of a director's cinema (or New Cinema), inspired in
large part by Italian neo-realism. In the 1950s Ray, Ritwik
Ghatak, Mriinal Sen, and others experimented with new
approaches, styles, and genres in order to explore West
Bengal's social reality.
Several developments of the next decade made it possible for the
New Cinema to spread beyond West Bengal. Film festivals and
societies introduced audiences and future filmmakers to foreign
films and to the work of Ray, whose Bengali-language films had
not previously been seen outside West Bengal. Meanwhile, the
government made it possible to learn filmmaking outside a
commercial setting with the creation of the Film Institute
of India in 1960 and the National Film Archive of India in 1964.
And in the late 1960s, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC,
founded in 1960) began to fund the experimental projects of New
Cinema directors. Since the success of Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan
Shome (1969), the FFC has aided the careers of such directors as
Basu Chatterji (The Whole Sky, 1969), Awtar Kaul (27 Down, 1973
), M.S. Sathyu (Hot Winds, 1975) and Shyam Benegal (The Seedling,
1974; The Role, 1977; The Essence, 1987).
In addition to the FFC, India's linguistic states, beginning
with Karnataka and Kerala in the south, also began to support
local production. Although non-Hindi, nonformula cinema
continues to proliferate throughout India, filmmakers
outside Bombay often turn to Hindi-language films in order to
reach the national market. Despite state and federal
support, India does not have an art cinema circuit; West Bengal
and Kerala are the only two linguistic states with an
educated middle class large enough to support a regional New
Cinema.
Although Bombay is no longer the production capital of Indian
film, its Hindi films are still seen as defining India's
national cinema, and thus they set the standards against which
other movements must define themselves. New Cinema, however,
has contributed both new directors and influences to
Bombay film. One recent trend in Bombay combines aspects of art
house and commercial films in a hybrid known as Middle Cinema.
Directors such as Chatterji, Tarachand Barjatya, Basu
Bhattacharya, and Sai Pranjpye use the satirical and realistic
elements of New Cinema within the context of popular, formula
conventions. Whether Middle Cinema reinforces the status quo
or represents a progressive evolution of mass cinema remains
an issue of hot debate among Indian intellectuals.
Other Indian directors who have recently attracted international
attention include Ketan Mehta (A Folk Tale, 1980; Spices, 1987)
and Mira Nair, whose Salaam Bombay! earned an Oscar
nomination for best foreign language film in 1989.
"Indian cinema everywhere", sums up critic Chidananda Das Gupta,
"is nothing if not didactic; even the song-and-dance formula
film has social and moral concerns hidden beneath its
escapism."