CINEMA IN INDIA: NATION & REGION ASSIGNMENT

Is there an 'Indian way' of film making? And how different regions share
sameness of the 'national culture' in their film making practices?

the Hindi film appears to be perhaps the most powerful cultural

product based on non Western aesthetic principles presently
alive (Lothar Lutze 1985:14) The difference between Hindi and
Western films is like that between an epic and a short story Javed
Akhtar (Rosie Thomas 1985:123)
When brought to a topic like Indian way of filmmaking, the first name that
comes to my mind is the very famous poet A.K. Ramanujan. He once wrote a
piece titled Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? He was quite interested in
the repeated themes that gave a different and unique touch to South Asian
culture a touch that can possibly be easily identifiable to an outsider or to
an insider who moves out. Popular films of India have a unique type of touch
that is quite evident even by foreigners who happen to just surf through
different channels sitting on their cozy sofa not only because the actors are
Indian. The Indian cinema look, sound, feel distinct and different in an
important fashion, and a filmic cultural shock may too accompany them and
an initial lengthy exposure.
Indian films have widely been known because of famous auteur like Satyajit
Ray and a number of musicals. That this huge and influential body of well

known art, disdained for ages, is now starting to get scholarly notice results
in the need for, at least, systemic realignment (as when a large new planet
swims into our ken); a more dauntless suggestion is that its different
universe might make possible an Einsteinian paradigm shift by introducing
novel ways of thinking about the space time of cinematic narrative. That is,
of course, if the universe is actually different and distinct. Assertions of the
distinctive and unique Indianness of the popular cinema or its deficiency
have come out from a variety of scholarly approaches, viz:
1. Cultural Historical: This traces the distinct characteristics of
Indian cinema to older styles of oral and theatrical performance, some
of which survive into modern times. A generally standard genealogy
cites the ancient epics Ramayana & Mahabharata, classical Sanskrit
drama, regional folk theatres of the middle and modern ages, and the
Parsee theatre of the late 19th and early 20th century.
2. Technological: Here the unique visual characteristics of Indian films
are traced to the introduction of technology of image reproduction and
representation during the second half of the 19th century, and as a
result, there was a fast and quick evolution and dissemination of a
common visual code for theatrical staging, poster art, cinema, comic
books, advertising etc. A similarly related approach, restricted to films,
evaluates camera work and sound, keeping in mind the rejection of the
Indian film directors and producers of the inevitable style and
centering principle of classic Hollywood in the direction and favour of

an aesthetic frontality, flashy camera work, and a consciously fake

and artificial style, further enhanced by the utilization of playback
singing and non synch sound.
3. Psychological or Mythic: This method reads popular films as
contemporary myths, which through the vehicle of fantasy and the
process of identification, temporarily heal for their audience the
principal stresses arising out of Indian family relationships (Kakar
1983:97), the favoured method is psychoanalytic (Kakar 1989: 25-41),
although theres been one single ambitious trial to use a mythological
film to change a basic and simple Freudian paradigm, at least with
respect to Indian culture. (Kurtz 1992)
4. Political Economic: This method, grounded in Marxist theory,
ascribes the unique characteristics of very well known Indian cinema
to the material and socio political scenario of 20th century India and of
the film industry itself, and asserts that the film encode an ideology
that subsumes a modernist scheme of equality and egalitarianism,
individualism, and radical social change with a feudal and non
equilateral and egalitarian status quo. (Prasad 1998, Kazmi 1999)
These approaches are neither encompassing nor necessarily
irreconcilable; many scholars combine two or more. It is fairly usual to
invoke the first by way of drawing a cultural background, and then to
advance to one or more of the others, perhaps examining a single film in
their terms. (Example, Dissanayake and Sahai 1992) At times, however,
there is an antagonistic characteristic between promoters of the first and

the fourth approaches. On the one hand, one comes across the majestic
claims that the classical tradition and especially the two grand Sanskrit
epics make up the the great code of popular way of film direction or
filmmaking and that any theoretical critique of Bombay cinema may
begin with a systematic analysis of the grand Indian meta text and
founder of Indian discursivity, namely the Mahabharata or Ramayana.
(Mishra 1985: 134, 145) This statement is often claimed by most of the
filmmakers themselves, as when film director Dharmesh Darshan tells an
interview, In India, our stories depend on the Ramayana all our stories
are somewhere connected to this holy book. On the other hand, a
Marxist scholar criticizes anthropologists and Indologists or others
employing the tools of these disciplines for their tendency to read
popular cinema as evidence of the unbroken continuity of Indian culture
and its tenacity in the face of the assault of modernity. He warns that
such eternalist proclamationswhile claiming to reveal the truth about
Indian cinema, actually contribute to the maintenance of an Indological
myth: the myth of the mythically minded Indian. In a more intense and
extreme case, a psychoanalyst and critic asserts that it is in fact nothing
traditionally Indian about popular cinema at all, and that its oeuvres
mean and represent an urban middle class phenomenon, a direct
outgrowth of the colonial presence and the sudectiveness of modern
technology. (Zutshi 2002)

There is a constant essence of Indian performance or some genetic

inheritance that make South Asians vulnerable to enjoy and relish three
hour long spectacles of melodrama, music, and action. Such taste and
preference for movies showcase and reflect nurture, not nature, and they,
and the films, serve them, are affected by various diverse forces that also
gradually change and transform over time. The affirmation that all
popular films are based on the epic stereotypically is quite visibly
groundless, as is the exaggerated (and abusing) generalization that they
showcase and reflect folk traditions that impinge on the Indians
psyche and never allow him to escape from the psychological parameters
of being an Indian villager (Anil Saari 1985:16) an estimate that lowers
down a population over one billion (approximately forty percent of them
reside in the urban areas) to (male) manifestations of an inevitably rustic
Indian psyche. But the Marxist cut back is meagerly more satisfactory:
M Madhava Prasads argument for the decades - long supremacy of a
single master narrative hinges on a few roughly sketched plot outline,
excludes questions of reception, and pays no heed to the films musical
element altogether. (Prasad 1998: 64-72)
Few practices and conventions are quite visibly ubiquitous of the Indian
cultural environment implied in verbal idioms, body language and
prevalent iconography. Hence they can be relearned by the further
generations without any extra efforts although their accurate forms at a
given time are of course subject to historical contingency and outside

influence. Indeed the hybridity of Indian popular cinema is another of

its proverbial characteristics; its medley and parody of foreign cultural
forms and traditional practices and its frequent borrowing of camera
shots, plot ideas, music and melodies. Although every cinema is borrowed
or is inspired from, the specific form that borrowing assumes or estimates
in the post colonial South Asia is what is to be examined properly and
read in depth. The visual and musical hybridity of the cinema has itself
become, like several other ingredients in its overall spicy masala mix, one
of the specific, unique and distinctive Indian features recognizing it as, in
Anil Saaris words, an eclectic, assimilative, imitative and plagiaristic
creature that is constantly rebelling against its influence (Anil Saari
1985:16)
Rosie Thomas has observed and pointed out that films are in no sense a
simple reflection of the wider society, but are produced by an apparatus
that has its own momentum and logic. (Rosie Thomas 1996:179) She
therefore highlights the power of cinematic conventions, whatever their
genealogy, to quickly become self perpetuating, serving to make the
audience aware of what a film should exactly look like and be. Since the
directors of the commercial film flicks constantly try to meet the
expectations of the audience, a fairly stable loop has been created. In this
sense and condition, it is, without any doubt, also correct to state that the
single biggest influence on Indian popular film has been the popular
Indian film itself. Yet it is quite visible that the unique conventions of this

form of art, which have firmly resisted the influence of western cinemas,
didnt rise to a cultural vacuum.
Academic scholarships took more than half a century to start to look at
cinematic looking, and indeed at cinema itself as a subject of serious
enquiry. The delay may have showcased not merely the enervation of
disciplines, but a more instilled superstition or prejudice toward text
towards image that may go back to at least to the Reformation and
Enlightenment. The multiplication of ever more sophisticated
technologies for the reproduction of images and especially of the moving
images in the 19th and 20th century was experienced by many scholars as
a daunting incursion on the cerebral realm of verbal discourse. As
Madhava Prasad asserts, scholars like Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz
assume an essentially realist cinema whose audience occupies an
isolated, individualized position of voyeurism coupled with an anchoring
identification with a figure in the narrative (Madhava Prasad 1998:74)
an estimation that creates problem when applied to Indian commercial
cinemas. A yet more holistic admiration of the cinematic experience
remains a challenging agenda, and sound and music continue to be
comparatively ignored and neglected realms.
Culture plays a pivotal role and overall tendencies to idealize, and to
think, in terms of , either the context free or context sensitive kind of
rules. Actual behavior is more complex though the rules are an important

factor in guiding behavior. In cultures, especially like that of India, the

context sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation.
1930s: The highlight of the thirties was the mythological. Phalkes Kaliya
Mardan, Raja Harishchandra, Gangavtaram etc are few examples of this
genre.
1940s: The highlights of the forties were the historical cinema. Sohrab
Modis Sikander, Jhansi Ki Rani, etc are few examples.
1950s: The highlights of the fifties were the social drama. Bimal Rays Do
Bigha Zameen, Bandini, Sujata, Mehboob Khans Mother India were few
popular films of that era.
1960s: 1960 saw the release of the magnum opus by K. Asif Mughal e
Azam followed by sweet romantic drama like Love in Shimla, Aaradhana
etc. 1960 was also the year when Rajesh Khanna was emerging as a
superstar.
1970s: The seventies saw the rise of Middle cinema in the Bombay
cinema circuit. For example: Hrishikesh Mukherjees Guddi, Chupke
Chupke etc. Also seventies was the time when we see the rise of the
Angry Young Man character of Amitabh Bachchan. Movies like Deewar,
Sholay, etc very illustrate this.
1980s: 1980s saw the rise of the realist cinema with Govind Nihalanis
Aakrosh and Ardh Satya. The Middle cinema also reached its pinnacle at

this period of time with Hrishikesh Mukherjees Khubsoorat, Gulzars

Ijaazat etc.
1990s: 1990s saw the rise of musicals and the figure of romantic heroes
in the face of Salman Khan and Shahrukh Khan. Dilwale Dulhaniya Le
Jayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota Hain, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun etc are examples to
illustrate my point.
2000s: The new millennium saw a drastic change in the process of
filmmaking. On one hand, there were teen - fantasy and romantic drama
like Mohabbatien, Mujhse Dosti Karoge etc and on the other directors like
Madhur Bhandarkar, Prakash Jha and Sudhir Mishra were directing more
realistic films like Page 3, Gangaajal, Chameli etc. The new millennium
also saw the introduction of new actors like Hrithik Roshan and Shahid
Kapoor.
2010s: The decade of 2010s also saw the rise of different genres of films
ranging from action thrillers like Singham or Dabanng to romantic
comedies like Aisha and I Hate Love Stories.
Summing it up, Indian way of filmmaking is quite tough to describe,
define or explain as it has different for different ages.