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The growth and development of the Parallel Cinema in India, oc-
cmed in the period from the end of the 1960s to the present.1 Here I focus
on the process by which a small, insignificant, highbrow stream of f h -
making gathered momentum and, by well-defined shifts, entered the domain
of India’s new television culture, with all the accoutrements of critical ac-
claim, media attention, government patronage, and a celebrity status of its
own.
There is, surprisingly, no accepted description .or sequencing of the
trends in Indian Parallel Cinema, and indeed the term itself is contested.
‘New’ and ‘New Wave’ Cinema were the terms first used in the late 1960s
and early 1970s’ but ‘New’ness has a habit of wilting with the passage of
time, and though the term is still heard today, its resonance is weakening.
‘Avant-Garde’ and ‘Offbeat’ cinema were tried,but never really found gen-
eral acceptance; and the ‘Art’ cinema became a term that its practitioners
were uncomfortable with, with its connotations of exclusivity and high-
browness. Embarrassed by the small audiences or - even worse - no
audiences, these filmmakers preferred to blame the existing structures
within the industry rather than acknowledge any unpopularity or exclusivity
for their product. The ‘so-called Art Cinema’ became a taunt mouthed

This essay was written for a conference entitled “Public Culture in India and Its
Global Problematics,” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council,April 1989.
Public culnlrc 25 Vol. 4, No. 1: Fall 1991
sneeringly by its critics and competitors. Sometime early in the 1980s, an
entire day’s session of a film seminar was devoted to debating what they
should call themselves, and the consensus proposal - ‘GoodCinema’ -
has, not surprisingly, not survived either. The terms ‘Parallel’ and

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‘Alternate’ cinema are perhaps the least partisan and problematic of the
terms, but also have the virtue of defining the phenomenon negatively, not
in terms of what it is, but what it strives not to be: by implication, the de-
graded, pop values of the commercial cinema. Admittedly this is an unsatis-
fying description, and perhaps one of the tasks of the future is to classify
and label the different unities and stages of the Parallel Cinema. For now,
the tenn w ill have to do.
The Indian progenitor of a cinema in radical opposition to the con-
ventions and taste of the commercial cinema was undoubtedly Satyajit Ray?
but he did not spawn a movement, probably because he was regarded as a
quirlq genius who had to struggle against impossible odds, which is never
a good recipe for emulation. But there are two points worth making about
Ray’s beginnings as a filmmaker, because they are recurring themes in the
Parallel Cinema that was to follow.
In depicting rural Bengal or Calcutta’s streets with felicity and
‘truth’, Ray was an embarrassment to the image of India that the govern-
ment was trying to project abroad. The Department of External Publicity
wanted to ban Parher Panchali from being shown abroad when it was first
made in 1955, and it needed Nehru’s intervention to Countermand the order.
In one form or another, this sensitivity to foreign perception and discomfort
with neo-realism has continued to be heard, even as’lateas 1980, when the
actress Nargis denounced Ray on the floor of Parliament for projecting a
negative aspect of India.
The second point is the obverse side of the same coin: Ray was fmt
recognised as a great filmmaker abroad. Aftex the first volley of accolades
fiom the West, Ray became a sarkari heera, a ‘jewel’ that the government
was proud to display in its showcase of cultural exhibits. Ray was even
more important to a government wanting to accent its modernity,for he was

* Ray completed his first film,Pather PmchaZi, in 1955. He had begun work on the
film in 1950, shooting when he had collecteda linle money, stopping when he ran out of
funds. Marie Seton’s account of Ray’s struggle to complete Pather Pancholi is a salutary
reminder of just how much of an oddball Ray must have seemed in the early 1950s.
 27

the first Indian artist whose greatness did not need the cloak of ancient tra-
dition.
One of the consequences of this ambivalent attitude towards
‘realistic’ films was that without the siflmrish of Western plaudits and ac-

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claim, an Indian filmmaker was unlikely to win government recognition or
support. Witness the films of Ritwik Ghatak, whose gloomy, brooding
portraits of village life in East Bengal went unnoticed in the 1950s and
1960~2
Even though the Government set up the Film Institute of India
at Pune and the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in 1960, ostensibly
to provide support to a minority cinema, there were few grounds to believe
that even towards the end of the 196Os, government initiative had made any
difference to the cause of an alternate cinema. To be sure, there were Ray
and Ghatak in Bengal, but by this time Ray’s international success had al-
lowed him to move beyond the pale of government support, and Ghatak
continued to languish without encouragement. Through the 196Os, the FFC
loan scheme followed a policy of backing only those films which were seen
to have a reasonable chance of commercial success. Then in 1968, the FFC
announced a new policy of supporting films which would otherwise not at-
tract commercial investment. The following year, Mrinal Sen made Bhuvan
Shome, which most people seem to agree is the film that inaugurated the
Parallel Cinema movement in India.
Bhuvan Shome told the story of a hard-boiled Railway official who
discovers the pastoral delights of ruralIndia, and its limited success in tradi-
tionally conservative markets was touted as the first signiscant achievement
of the FFC’s new policy.
Interestingly, Ray himself wasmconvinced:

My own opinion is that whatever success it has had has not been because
of, but in spite of its new aspects. It worked because it used some of the most

Even at the National Awards, Ghatak’s films were overlooked again and again in
favour of rubbishy, sentimental commercial films. In 1958, Ghatak’s Ajantrik was ig-
nored, and the Award given to Deb& BOX’SSagar Sangame. In 1960, Meghe Dhaka
Taru lost out to a soppy melodrama called Anuradha. And the following year, the top
award went to Bijoy Basu’s tatty Bhagini Nivedita, passing over Komal Gandhar. It
wasn’t just a colossal abexTation of taste and judgement. It is useful to remember just how
much puzzlement and anger a simple, realistic portrayal of village life could arouse in the
prevailing context of Entertainment films.
28

popular conventions of cinema which helped soften the edges of its occasionally
spiky syntax. These conventions are: a delectable heroine, an e a r f i i g back-
ground score, and a simple, wholesome, wish-fulfilling screen story (summary
in seven words: Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle)?

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In 1969, it did seem that the only way of breaking through to tradi-
tional film audiences, even a minority audience, was through one or another
variant of the Trojan Horse strategy -by dressing the new films up in the
conventions of song and dance, or by making concessions to traditional
taste in terms of plot and treatment. (Echoes of this strategy, with minor
variations, continue to be heard today.) Then, in 1970, there appeared two
uncompromising films which were to represent two new contrary trends in
Parallel Cinema.
The first of these was Samskizra, based on a novel by the Kannada
writer U. R. Anantamurthy. The scriptwriter, lead player and moving spirit
behind the film was Girish Karnad. He had been a Rhodes Scholar, was
now working for the Oxford University Press in Madras, and had begun to
build for himself a reputation as a modem Kannada playwright. Together
with Pattabhi Rama Reddy, a somewhat frayed poet who had been one of
the leaders of progressive Telugu writing in the 195Os, Kamad recruited a
wholly non-professional cast drawn for the most part from amateur English
theatre in Madras. Lacking a camemman, they roped in an Australian pro-
fessional who happened to be passing through Madras?
S m h a was steeped in the ambience of an effete Madhva Brahmin
community convulsed by the problems brought on,by the death of a rene-
gade member of the order. Despite its seams, the film was a fresh, authen-
tic-looking portrayal of a traditional order going to seed. It went on to win
the President’s Gold Medal at the National Awards, and even had a moder-
ately successful run in its home state, Karnataka. By Bombay’s standards,

‘An Indian New Wave?’, in Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, New Delhi:
Orient Longmans, 1976 99.
“It was really as simple and accidental as that,” Kamad later recounted. “All of us
were fired by tremendous raw enthusiasm, and all of us contributed something in a hap-
hazard way to the direction. When I was playing a scene, Vasudev [a painter friend who
handled Art direction] would tell me if I was doing alright, and when I was not acting I
was rehearsing the Brahmins, telling then how to say their lines, what gestures to use...,
I only had the barest acquaintance with the technicalities of films. We left that to Tom
Cowan, the Australian cameraman.” Interview with Girish Kamad in India Today,Oct 1-
15,1976 36.
Samskara only earned a pittance. But it had cost less than 200,000 rupees,6
and for the first time outside Bengal, here was a sign that a realistic, low-
budget cinema was a viable proposition.
In the same year, Mani Kaul made his debut with Uski Roti in

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Hindi, financed by a loan from the FFC.In sharp contrast to the wholly
‘amateur’ beginnings of both Ray and Karnad, Kaul was one of the earliest
graduates of the Film Institute of h e , and he brought to his very first f h
a technical control and a formalistic concern that was, for Indian cinema,
completely novel.
Uski Roti is the story of a Punjabi truck driver’s wife who waits,
day after day, on the highway outside her village for her husband to stop to
collect his lunch packet. The story line is thin, and there is little dialogue.
UskiRoti was India’s fmt truly experimental film, probing the very bound-
aries of narrative cinema. Kaul had cleverly manipulated one of the most
enduring images of traditional Indian art, the woman who waits for her
lover to return. In the classical portrait her waiting is suffused with the
promise of a lover’s tryst, the languorous expectation of fulfillment. In Uski
Roti, the woman’s waiting has a sense of drudgery and futility about it, by
which Kaul intended to evoke the breakup of village society, the loss of in-
nocence and purpose in the machine age.
Uski Roti was a disconcerting filmin its slowness and painful atten-
tion to detail, and even for the kind of audiences - small enough - that
were prepared to applaud Ray’s films and Samskara, Uski Roti was too
mannered and obtuse, too far removed €torn their expectations of realistic
cinema. Unlike Samskara, UskiRoti never found a release, and to this day
has only been seen at special screenings.
In the early 1970s, with a sudden spurt of new, low-budget films,
the line dividing the realistic Samskzzra kind of film and the more formal ex-
perimental kind of film began to harden into a clear opposition of method
and principle.
In Karnataka, the success of Samskara spawned a rash of low-bud-
get realistic f b s based on rural themes. In Kerala too, the success of Va-
sudevan Nair’s and Adoor Gopalakrishnan’sfnst films can be seen as the
beginnings of a similar movement, such that by 1974, these two states seem
almost to have evolved a new low-budget formula of frlms dealing with
caste, religion and the decadence of traditional village life.

About $12,500.
 Meanwhile in Bombay, Mani Kaul followed Uski Roti with Ashadh
Ka Ek Din (1971) and a little later, Duvidha (1973), in which he carried
further forward his aim of disrupting conventional narrative and realistic
modes of speech and performance. By now, he was no longer alone. Ku-

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mar Shahani, a Film Institute colleague, made MWQ Darpan in 1972 and
appeared, if anything, to be even more preoccupied with abstract, fomal is-
sues in cinema.
To pause in mid-decade: the Parallel Cinema had definitely arrived,
but was split into two clearly separate streams -on the one hand, a cinema
by enthusiastic amateurs, operating for the most part from Karnataka and
Kerala? who delved into local literary cultural traditions for their subjects.
In what seems today to have been a remarkable exodus, poets, novelists,
journalists and theatrewallahs suddenly seemed to have discovered the cin-
ema and crossed over in gay disregard of the difficulties of working in a
new medium.* It is understandable that these people, taking their first steps
in a medium with which they were utterly unfamiliar, were not overly con-
cerned with cinematic form and experimentation. They simply carried their
cameras into the villages with unbounded optimism that they would be able
to portray traditional village life in as authentic a way as possible. This was
India’s neo-realist movement, but noticeably, the filmmakers steered clear
of political statement and were concerned with portraying village society ‘as
it is’. ‘Romantic’ was a dirty word in their lexicon; it was the doctrine of the
Artist as Witness, and drew inspiration from the only paradigm that Indian
cinema had to offer -the work and sensibility of Satyajit Ray. But perhaps
the most important new development was that within their own states, these
films found an audience and recovered their meagre costs; the magic circuit
was complete.
The FFC,on the other hand, came to be identified with a difficult,
experimental cinema, manned for the most part by professionally trained
filmmakers whose aesthetic concerns were bold and revolutionary but re-
mote, even for Westemised audiences in India. It was perhaps a little unfair
that the FFC came to be so closely identified with the work of Kaul and

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, an FII product, is an exceptionto this rule.

* A typicalexample was the way B. V. Kiuanth was inducted into cinema. “The author
of the novel Vamsha Vriksha wanted Karanth to direct the Nm,and when it was objected
that Karanth h e w nothing about film,the author insisted than even Karanth’s mistakes
will be more interesting than what established f h people would do to his script.’’ Girish
Karnad in IIldia Today,Oct 1-15,1976~36.
 31

Shahani,for since the change in its loan policy in 1968, the FFC had sup-
ported a number of low-budget films which were far from experimental or
difficult. But for the opposition to this kind of cinema, Kaul and Shahani’s
unsold, unseen films offered a more direct and vulnerable target, and they

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were caught in the crossfire of a furious debate. Kaul and Shahani were up-
braided for being self-indulgentpseudoaesthetes,peddling a kind of cinema
that was utterly irrelevant to the Indian scene. (‘Relevance’ was a key word
in the debate.) The FFC was accused of wasting public funds on films
which were destined to Tot in their cans, and even Satyajit Ray wrote acidly
that “Kaul’s wayward kagile aesthetic has led him to the sickbed,’’ and ac-
cused him of “threatening film language with extinction.’*
Kaul and Shahani seemed undismayed, and insisted on their right to
make films that did not pander to the vulgar tastes of the market. They also
attacked realistic cinema as being overrated and pas&, and for perpetrating a
false alternative to popular cinema.

Realism of detail can be a mask for eluding the real problems of society....
Such forms are needed for upperclass consumption, the classes who are most at
home when they speculate -at the stockmarket or on the universe.l0

In rejecting the tastes and values of commercial cinema, Kaul and

Shahani were standing on well-trodden ground. In attacking realism, how-
ever, they were taking on, as they well reabsed, the New Cinema estab-
lishment. Karnad had become the Director of the Film Instituteat b e , and
Ray’s pronouncements had acquired the ring of UItimate Authority. Kaul
and Shahani’s disregard for an audience, Ray declared, “seems suspiciously
like a defensive manoeuvre... I do not know of a single film-maker who has
been dismayed by a wider acceptanceof his woTkt”11
Perhaps without the example of the low-budget f h s succeeding in
Karnataka and Kerala, Kaul and Shahani might have got away with insist-
ing that their films should not be judged by the yardstick of the marketplace.
Under the circumstances, however, the debate turned on the question of
whether they were ‘relevant’to contemporary audiences. ‘Viability’ became
the yardstick, and the government was forced to consider whether, in

‘An Indian New Wave?’,p. 98.

lo ‘Mythsfor Sale’, in Semimr, ‘The Cinema Situation’, Dec. 1974: 13.
l1 ‘An Indian New Wave?’, p. 98.
funding their films, the FFC was playing its role conectly. Early in 1975, a
government committee censured the FFC for not having considered the fi-
nancial viability of its films. The Corporation was instructed henceforth to
treat all money advanced as loans, strictly repayable, and was asked to re-

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frain from supporting fdms which were not good commercial prospects.
The entire Board of the FFC resigned in protest, bringing to a dra-
matic end one phase of the Parallel Cinema movement. The government had
rejected Kaul and Shahani’s claims to support on the grounds that they were
pure artists. But what exactly was the government willing to support?
If the National Awards are any indication, the new provincial cinema
provided one model. The Awards list from 1969 through to 1980 is an un-
varying litany of names from the Parallel Cinema of Karnataka and Kerda
interspersed with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. But it is important to re-
member that the central government played no role in their funding or suc-
cess, and throughout this period, it is possible to detect the same unease
with neu-realismthat had brought about the ban on Pather Pancfialiin 1955
and the embargo on Louis Malle’s documentary films on India in 1970. The
Artists as Witness, Life As It Is, is not a doctrine that bureaucrats or politi-
cians are cornfortablewith.
The tendency was more clearly marked during Mrs. Gandhi’s
Emergency, when it appears that the central and state governments arrived at
clearly different conclusions about the utility and desirability of supporting
the Parallel Cinema. Between 1975 and 1977 various state governments
clambered onto the cinema bandwagon. Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab,
Bengal and Andhra Pradesh now joined Karnataka’and Kerala in offering
incentives to both entrepreneurs and filmmakers to promote cinema in their
own regional languages. Apart from the obvious benefit of creating em-
ployment and generating new revenues, these states were spurred on by the
temptation of something much bigger. It was widely perceived that Kar-
nataka and Kerala had effected some sort of cultural breakthrough with their
prize-winning films,an assertion of regional culture on the national stage,
which a l l the other states were keen to emulate.
For the Centre, however, the honeymoon was over and the authori-
tarian atmosphere of the Emergency gave full rein to its reservations about
realism. B. V. Karanth’s Chomuna Dudi, about a p r Harijan’s struggle to
rent some land, won the President’s Gold Medal in 1975 but was only al-
lowed to be screened with a caption tacked on at the end, explaining that the
wretched condition of Harijans that the film depicted referred to a periodbe-
fore India’s independence, and that the government had since then taken
steps to lift the Harjjans out of their poverty and to dispel the social preju-
dice against them, In the atmosphere of the 20-point programmes the com-

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~ was hamless, mindless entertainment But at
mercial cinema was a l l n g h it
a time when the Films Division documentaries were depicting a huge sun
rising over fields of high-yielding wheat,.there was no room for pessimism
in the cinema. Signrficantly,between 1975 and 1977,the FFC did not fund
a single film.
At this time there were only two.examples of Parallel filmmakers
who had found the means of operating without the crutches of government
support: Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal.
Sen was by no means new to cinema He had begun in Calcutta in
the 19%, at about the same time as Ray, but his first eight or nine Bengali
films,made in the space of 12 years, seldom rose above a plodding medi-
ocrity. Soon after the FFC began to support low-budget films in 1968, Sen
made Bhuvan Shome in Hindi, which lifted him out of the relative shelter of
Bengali cinema. Despite Ray’s unflattering remarks cited earlier, the film
brought Sen a measure of national interest and attention. Then quite sud-
denly, Sen turned sharply to the left. The immediate inspiration was the
French New Wave, and Godard in particular, but equally, the sudden flar-
ing of political passions in Calcuttaat the time.
Between 1970 and 1973,Sen made four Bengali films,none of
them seen outside Bengal, but in Calcutta they brought him a kind of noto-
riety as the Left’s alternativeto Ray’s ‘bourgeois complacency’. The films
themselves had a lumpy, gritty, uneven quality as Sen experimented with
techniques of disrupting linear narrative and disengaging-theaudience with
Brechtian devices. These were his fust steps towards finding a personal
style, but they were a necessary schooling in the techniques of a didactic,
political cinema. Drawing on the petit bourgeois experience of a major In-
dian city and operating completely outside the ambit of government support,
Sen’s films of this period were markedly different from any other trend in
India’s Parallel Cinema. But it was not till much later, around 1980,with a
slow maturing of his style and a deliberate sheathing of the sharp, abrasive
tone of his political films,that Sen emerged as a major figure in the Indian
Parallel Cinema. He will perhaps never be associated with a trend or move-
ment; he is far too complex, quirky and unpredictable to inspire imitation.
Yet for precisely these reasons, he will always be interesting, for he seems
to have belatedly discovered the means of engaging an audience with his er-
ratic, ipprovisatory genius.
Shyam Benegal anived by a somewhat different route. He started as

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a copywriter for an advertising fm in Bombay, and later switched to mak-
ing advertising films and documentaries. By the early 1970s, Benegal had
made a reputation in Bombay’s commercial world for his slick, no-non-
sense short films which he churned out at a prodigious rate. Then in 1974,
he found backing from an advertising company for his first feature film.
In Ankur (The Seedling) Benegal told the story of a diffident young
landlord who returns to his rural estates and, somewhat ineptly, tries to as-
sume the postures of traditional authority that he has seen in his father. Like
the work of Karnad, Karanth, Nair and others working in regional cinema,
Benega17sfilm explored the relationships of a crumbling feudal system in
the villages. But quite unlike the tyros working in the south, Benegal
demonstrated a familiarity with technique and a quiet, assured handling of
narrative which set him apart.
Benegal followed Ankur with Nishant, once again about a family of
feudal landlords who rape, threaten and bully the poor villagers at will. But
where the protagonist in Ankur was a character of some substance and
complexity, the evil landlord brothers in Nisharzr came dangerously close to
being cardboard rogues, plucked straight out of the commercial cinema. “If
this is political cinema, we’ve been at it since Dadasaheb Phalke,” his critics
thundered. But even his detractorscould not deny that Benegal made f h s
with a panache and gloss that had never been seen in’Indian cinema before.
Perhaps it was precisely the pretty packaging, the gift-wrapped slogans that
angered them most. For unlike the regional realist school of filmmakers,
Benegal was very conscious of a radical political message in his films.
Benegal was the first Parallel Cinemawallah to break through to a
popular audience. It was an urban, educated, and perhaps primarily a West-
emised audience, but it was large enough to leave him free to work outside
the constraints of government sponsorship or low-budget loans. He has ap-
parently faced little difficulty in finding commercial backing for his prolific
output of films,though it is a strangely motley list12

l2 Blaze Advertising stayed with him for three films: a dairy farmers’ co-qmative
funded Manthan (1976); and with Junoon and Kalyug, Benegal tapped the world of com-
mercial cinema financein the person of actor-producer Shashi Kapoor. h o b was backed
 Benegal’s critics refer to his f”llms disparagingly as the Middle Cin-
ema, but it is probably not a label that Benegal would resent. He was the
frst Indian Parallel Cinemawallah to aim at an all-India audience, and be-
lieves firmly in the gradualist strategy, that the road to good cinema lies in

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taking the audience along, in mixing good taste with popular ingredients.
He has functioned like a broker between the castiron traditions of popular
cinema and the more sombre aspects of the minority film.And something of
Benegal’s own style has rubbed off on both of them.
One of the most interesting aspects of Benegal’s Middle Cinema is
the aura of radical-chic and glamour that surrounded his films. It had
something to do with the glossiness and superb production values of his
films, which made the Parallel Cinema before him seem shoddy and drab by
comparison. But it also had something to do with his players. Benegal
didn’t use stars to begin with. But he scouted for talent in little-known
places, gambled with new faces, and very quickly turned these actors and
actresses into minor stars who continued to grow in stature with each film.
The Parallel Cinema had not created any well-known actors before. Now
suddenly, Benegal’s repertory contained a string of players -Naseeruddin
Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Om Puri, Amrish Pun, Kulbhushan
Kharbanda, even Girish Karnad - who became celebrities in their own
right.
By 1980 or thereabouts, the Parallel Cinema scene showed some
significant differences from 1975.With the withdrawal of FFC support, the
Kaul-Shahani stream of esoteric avant-garde cinema had withered. Interest-
ingly, the provincial cinema was beginning to falter too, though the reasons
are not clear. Perhaps the novelty of realism had worn off; perhaps the style
and techniques of this kind of cinema had been co-opted by the regional
commercial cinema, which must have blunted the appeal of the realistic cin-
ema somewhat But the stakes had gone up too. The black-and-whitefilms
of the early 1970s were considered pass6 even in the regional cinema, and
costs had risen accordingly to four and five times the cost of Samskura. It
wasn’t possible to be a barefmt filmmaker in Ramataka or Kerala anymore.
It is also likely that state government support was less forthcoming now that
the provincial Parallel Cinema had been edged off the national stage by
Benegal‘s more begwlins cinema.

by the communist government of West Bengal, and Blaze Advertising came back for more
with Mondi and Trikaal.
36

Benegal’s Middle Cinema was the major new development of the

second half of the 1970s, for he had shown a way out of the ghetto of the
low-budget minority film. Interestingly, he had few followers13 at this
stage, and the Film Institute boys who were beginning to spread their wings

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in the late 1970s struck out on a new path, even while they borrowed the
actors and actresses whom Benegal had made famous. These actors were to
become the new Trojan Horse of the decade, the vehicles for smuggling a
new kind of cinema into the fortress of the popular film.
The new EIlI radicals of the 1970s -to coin a term -had grown
up in the thick of the internecine Parallel Cinema debate. Ray versus Mrinal
Sen, neerealism versus modernism, Brecht versus Stanislavse, being-
seen versus being-true: the FllIradicals had cut their teeth on these issues,
and the short history of the Parallel Cinema, its successes and failures, in-
formed their view of their role as filmmakers. Syed Mirza, Ketan Mehta,
Kundan Shah, Vinod Chopra, Pankuj Parasher and company belonged to a
new generation of sophisticated, urbane, Westernised film students, more at
ease with Antonioni and Godard and Bresson than Satyajit Ray or Girish
Karnad. In Indian tenns, they owed spiritual and artistic allegiance to Mani
Kaul and Kumar Shahani, who had continued to lecture and teach and influ-
ence students at the Film Institute through the 1970s. But the students were
well aware that in the particular conditions operating in India, Kaul and
Shahani’s films led to a dead end. From the very beginning these students
understood that if they were to continue to make films, they had to find a
means of confecting their films so that they appealed to an audience. They
rejected Benegal’s Middle Cinema with its picturelpostcard rural settings
and simple moral algebra, but for all these filmmakers, part of the solution
was to borrow Benegal’s stars as ‘bait’ for an audience, so to speak.
At first sight, it appears that there was little similarity between the
first films of Syed &a, Vhod Chopra, Ketan Mehta, et d.Mjna’s first
film was a heavyhanded, brooding morality play set in Bombay’s commer-
cial world. Ketan Mehta tested the appeal of an ethnic chic rural locale for
his Gujarati folktale, and Vinod Chopra made a cold murder mystery punc-
tuated with devices of Brechtian alienation. Others like Anil Tejani and
Pankuj Parasher headed straight for Bombay’s commercial territory. All of

l3 Govind Nihahni, Aparna Sen and, possibly, Gautam Ghosh are regarded as occupy-
ing the Same Middle Cinema niche as BenegaL Some people extend the definition to in-
clude Mahesh Bhatt and Sai Paranjpai as welL
them relied heavily on Benegal’s stable of actors. And they were not averse
to using songs and a strong background score if that helped too. It was as
though they had agreed beforehand to track out in different directions, and
to signal the others when they found the farmula that ‘worked’.

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Purely in tenns of fmding an audience, or getting distributed, none
of their first films was a success. But they continued to experiment and
make mid-course correCtions, bending over a little further to try to interest a
wider audience, testing new genres and story lines. There was still no
breakthrough, but by 1982 or thereabouts, something had happened to the
climate of filmmaking in India that had turned in favour of the new Parallel
Cinema. And perhaps the single biggest factor in this changed climate was
the attitude of government.
In 1979, the Indian International Film Festival inaugurated a special
showcase of the best Indian cinema of the year, known as the Panorama
Section. Minority Indian cinema had never been easy for the Western critic
or film buff to see, but here was a special window to the Parallel Cinema in
India. The first reports in the foreign press were enthusiastic, with an ex-
citement akin to the discovery of Brazilian Cinema Nuovo in the 1960s or
the new Australian cinema of the 1970s. Filmindia, the fEst major exposi-
tion of Indian Parallel Cinema, was organised like a grand touring circus in
the United States.
Like the films of Kaul and Shahani, and Ghatak before them, Syed
Mirza’s and Ketan Mehta’s films had barely been seen by audiences in In-
dia. Now they were being presented along with the films of Benegal, Niha-
lani, Girish Karnad and Mrinal Sen, as the best that Indian cinema had to
offer in the last 20 years.
The Filmindia exposition in the United States was only the begin-
ning of a string of foreign f h exhibitions. In 1982, the Festival of India
opened in London with another showcase of Indian Parallel Cinema. This
was to become a regular feature in each of the Festivals of India that the In-
dian Government organised successively in the United States, France,
Russia and Japan. The Parallel Cinema had become a cultural exhibit on par
with classical dance, ritual art and sculpture and the handloom sari. At one
stroke, the Festivals of India had conferred a dignity on the P d e l Cinema
it had lacked earlier, and significantly, at home there was no more talk about
this cinema’s struggle to survive. Even Kaul and Shahani were resurrected
and given some sort of recognition as the ‘stem poets’of Indian cinema.
38

The taunt has often been heard that the Parallel Cinema in India is
created solely for consumption14 abroad, and that the Festival culture has
freed it from its dependence on an audience. This is an allegation difficult to
prove one way or the other. Recognition, kudos, awards in foreign festivals

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do sewe the Indian Parallel Cinema as some sort of insulation against failing
with an audience, but it is difficult to prove a filmmaker’s cynical disregard
for an audience at home in favour of foreign festival popularity. Neverthe-
less, it is useful to remember the role that foreign recognition does play in
India. Even SatyajitRay needed the kudos from the West before he was no-
ticed at home, and this element was operating in a bigger way than ever be-
fore as the traffic in films and ideas grew after 1980.
By 1982 or so, the Parallel Cinema seemed to have found a new
preoccupation with the city, especially its poor, underprivileged marginal
lumpen elements. Here was a clear break with the provincial cinema of the
1970s. Karnad, Karanth, Gopalakrishnan, Kasarvalli and company be-
longed in the provincial rural or small-town milieu they portrayed in their
films. They understood its language and culture. The new FlTI radicals
were city-bred, and their choice of subject and social setting had something
ethnographic about it, a sort of casting around for an exotic context or
community. Theirs was an outsider’s way of looking at things, and it is
surely a startling fact that none of their films were about the class or culture
to which they belonged themselves.15
The other thing to notice about heir films is their moralising didactic
tone, political or othewise. Benegal and Nihalani had already occupied the
left radical-chic high ground, which now became contested territory. In the
atmosphere of the Parallel Cinema in the 1980s, it became mandatory for
filmsto canry an ‘important’ message, to speak up for a silent, downtrodden
minority, to be about some terribly vital issue in Indian Society.
Here again, there is a break from the provincial cinema, which had
been mostly apolitical and obsessed with tradition and ritual. I see the new
political postures as an aspect of their insecurity. The audiences were still

l4 W
ith the exception of Ray and Mrinal Sen, the Indian patallel Cinema does not sell
well in the West, not even to small Art Cinema houses. So ‘consumption’ is more a
matter of critical notice and representationat festivals.
l5In the Middle Cinema, Benegal’sKdyug, Nihalani’s Party and Ivlahe.sh Bhatt’s Arth
are ostensiily about upper-class English-qxxdang Indians. But they don’t speak English
in the films, and their culture is quite unrecognisable.The only recent film to try to por-
tray this class and language is the author’sIn WhichAnnie Gives It Those Ones (1988).
not rolling in, government support was vital, and claiming to be ‘relevant’
and ‘important’ was a way of claiming their right to live, it was a legitimis-
ing act.
Linked to this attitude is the curious fact that the new Indian Parallel

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Cinema has shown a singular reluctance to explore individuals and their re-
lationships. Everywhere else, the cinema has tended to exploit its own
voyeuristic potential, its privileged view into the private, intimate, &era-
ble areas of people’s lives. The Indian Parallel Cinema has chosen to close
its eyes. Perhaps this has something to do with its ethnographic outlook It
is populated by ‘types’ and ‘representatives’ and iconic figures and sym-
bols, not individuals.
In the new atmosphere of official patronage, the FFC -now called
the NFDC -resumed its sponsorship of the Parallel Cinema. There was
still no sign of the alternate distribution-exhibition system that had been
t a l k 4 about for so long, but the Festivals provided the NFDC with a raison
d‘e^tre,and there was no more talk of the Parallel Cinema being in danger.
Along with its liberalised loan scheme, the NFDC inaugurated a new Fully
Financed Scheme, relieving the filmmaker of all elements of production and
risk.
By 1982 or so, however, the provincial Parallel Cinema was practi-
cally dead. As mentioned earlier, the cost factor had moved beyond the
means of state government sponsorship, but the regional audiences had also
shifted their attention to a more garish, seductive, commercialisedregional
language cinema
Then, by 1984 or 1985, a new element was introduced into the
numbers game, in terms of both audience figures and the returns. Television
went commercial. The Sunday evening feature-film slot opened its doors to
the Parallel Cinema, and a new concept -the Television Premiere -was
initiated. It now became possible for an unreleased film to premiere on tele-
vision to an audience estimated at upwards of 30 million.For a prize-win-
ning or Panorama-selected film,television paid Rs.8 lakhs, which was
more than half the average total cost of a Parallel Cinema film. Purely in fi-
nancial terms, it was an unprecedented bonanza, and a little bit of co-ordi-
nation by the Ministry of Idomation and Broadcasting-which controlled
both television and the NFDC - ensured that the NFDC became a major
beneficiary.
40

The Parallel Cinemawallahs had found their audience. A captive au-

dience, admittedly, unable to switch to another channel, but a vast, unprece-
dented audience nonetheless. It is probably not a coincidence that some-
where around this time, in the mid-l98Os, the Parallel Cinema attained

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celebrity status in India.
As television has expanded, it has opened up a whole range of new
programmes and serials to filmmakers,.andthe Parallel Cinema has grasped
the opportunity with alacrity. In the last two years or so,there has been a
steady exodus of filmmakers from the cinema to television. Syed Mirza,
Kundan Shah, Govind Nihalani, Romesh Sharma, m a s h Jha, Shyam
Benegal have all crossed over to the Box, and have been winning audiences
and making money, an irresistible combination. We’ve heard a lot of
grumbling from them about television triVialising their work, and not allow-
ing them the breadth and time to craft their fdm carefully, but I suspect that
television has taken over, and that the gnunbling is merely an embarrass-
ment at finding themselves so cosily in the mainstream.
Television has been around for b o short a time for its effects and re-
alignments on the Parallel Cinema to be totally clear. Many individual film-
makers are still at the stage where they are testing its appeal, experimenting
with its forms,but there is no denying that television has provided every-
thing the Parallel Cinemawallah has wanted but didn’t know how to ask for:
money, an audience, attention, and celebrity status.
On television itself, the lines demarcating.Parallel Cinema from
mainstream cinema are already getting bllurred Programmecontent is tightly
supervised by television, and the commercial cinema,’ insofar as it has reori-
ented itself towards television, must make programmes according to its per-
ceptions of what the television authorities want. The bandwidth of what is
seen to be acceptable content is quite narrow, and the commercial cine-
mawallahs are busy trying to look and sound like the Parallel Ciemawal-
lahs, because they are perceived to be the blue-eyed boys of the official
media.
There is now a steady traffic of actors and creators and technicalper-
sonnel that crosses and re-crosses the Parallel Cinema-CommercialCinema
divide as if it didn’t exist. Television has completely altered the old cinema
equations, and is in the process of creating a new national programme cul-
ture whose character and dimensions are only just beginning to be articu-
lated. The Parallel Cinema - the urbane, Westemised, radical-sounding,
funds-starved, audience-seeking,marginal film of the late 1970s and 1980s
-has been irretrievably diverted into the centre of this new television cul-
ture, with what effect we still have to see.
Studies of Public Culture rightly tend to emphasize the role and in-

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fluence of the popular, commercialcinema, rather than the minority arthouse
film,but I would like to suggest that the Indian Parallel Cinema is worthy of
special attention for two or three reasons. We have seen that, far from being
an exclusive preserve of the aesthete or intellectual, the Parallel Cinema oc-
cupies a position in the crossfire of cultural debate in India. Far from being
a haughty, highbrow movement serenely unconcerned with the reception it
receives at the hands of the Philistine ‘generaljanra’, it has been obsessively
concerned with reaching out and being ‘relevant’. The Parallel Cinema has
led an embattled existence, but in its struggle to survive, to adapt to the re-
alities of Indian audiences and conditions, it has touched and changed the
commercialcinema too.
We have seen how quickly neo-realism permeated the provincial
cinema of Karnataka and Kerala in the 1970s; Benegal and the FIlI films of
the 1980s have less demonstrably but equally decisively altered the character
of a whole stream of Bombay’s cinema. In this special sense, I think the im-
portance of the Parallel Cinema is that it has functioned like a conduit to the
cinema and ideas and culture of the Western world, shaping and interpreting
that encounter for its viewers. This is a role that is likely to expand and di-
versify as the Parallel Cinema extends its influence through its privileged
relationship with the government and television.

Pradip Krishen is a filmmaker who chooses to live in Delhi, far away from the
centers of filmmaking in India. He has made two feature films: Massey Sahib (1985) and
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988).