By Jonathan
DeHart
Despite the fact that Hindi-language
Bollywood is often used as an umbrella term, Indian cinema is multitudinous,
which is why Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan called the popular moniker into
question at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month.
Indeed, Bachchan (“Big B”) has
raised a good point. There are as many flavors of Indian movies as there are
languages to drive the stories told in the Subcontinent’s films. The palate is
larger-than-life: gods and goddesses, issues of caste and religious diversity,
melodramatic tales of star-crossed lovers, and of course, song and dance.
“Bollywood has often been portrayed
as a musical-producing industry in the west, which is untrue,” Parichay Patra,
a graduate student at Monash University who is co-editing Salaam Cinema:
Representations and Interpretations – Celebrating 100 Years of Bombay Cinema,
told The Diplomat. “Indian film scholars are quite certain about the
fact that genre-determination is impossible in this part of the world… So what
the Western audience should keep in mind is that generic divisions do not exist
in Indian cinema.”
Without the life raft of genre
categories to cling to, where does one begin? This is where we left off last time. Thanks the general internationalization of cinema and the
attention drawn to Indian cinema this month on Bollywood’s 100th
anniversary, Bachchan’s sentiment is catching on. To make this point clear, a
quick summary of India’s cinematic history is in order.
“It is possible, to my mind at
least, to divide ‘Indian cinema’ into a few phases,” Rochona Majumdar,
associate professor of Indian cinema history in the University of Chicago’s
Department of Cinema and Media Studies, told The Diplomat. “During this
time and until after independence (from the British Raj) the Indian film
industry was organized, much like Hollywood, into studios… (which) made films
in multiple languages.”
According to Majumdar, from this
matrix emerged a number of classics, such as Do Bigha Zamin (directed by
Bimal Roy), The Apu trilogy (Satyajit Ray), Mother India (Mehboob
Khan), Awara and Shri 420 (Raj Kapoor), Saheb Biwi au Ghulam
and Pyaasa (Guru Dutt), Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak), Sholay
(Ramesh Sippy), Deewar (Yash CHopra), Amar Akbar Anthony
(Manmohan Desai).
If India’s overwhelmingly diverse
cinematic history was boiled down into decade-long blocks of time, it would
look something like this. In the beginning – 1913 to be precise – there was Raja
Harishchandra (see above). Then came the advent of sound in films
(“talkies”) in the 1930s. This major leap was followed by a series of
breakthrough films in the 1940s and 1950s, including the landmark Hindi film, Mother
India (1957).
“All Hindi films come from Mother
India,” Dudrah said.
Moving on, Rajesh Khanna was a
notable romantic hero of the 1960s, the “angry young man genre” of the 1970s
(with a young Amitabh Bachchan at the helm). In the 1980s, Disco Dancer (1982),
a rags-to-riches story of a street performer set against the backdrop of the
disco era, and romantic drama Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (translated as, From
Doom to Doom, 1988) were blockbusters, while more familiar names in the
West like Sharukh Khan began to emerge in the 1990s. Finally, in the 2000s, a
new crop of directors began to make films with a more global sensibility.
Where is the easiest starting point?
Dudrah makes that choice simple. “For those who are just getting started, I’d
recommend two films,” he said. “Sholay (1975), a ‘curry Western’ that is
high on action and melodrama with amazing stars and Indian cinema’s most
memorable villain.”
The second film on Dudrah’s starter
list is 1995 romantic comedy Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (aka DDLJ).
DDLJ, voted India’s favorite film over the past 100 years, marks the entry of the diaspora on the film scene.
“There is amazing chemistry between
Shahrukh Khan and Kajol,” Dudrah said. “Here's the kicker. The film (DDLJ)
was still running in cinemas after six years.”
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