Wimal Dissanayake starts the essay “Rethinking Indian Popular Cinema: Towards newer frames of

Understanding” by emphasizing the need to analyse Indian popular cinema in a serious way. India is the
largest film producing country in the world. The film industry in the country churns out more than 700
films an year. 90 percent of those films belong to the genre of popular cinema. India has its share of
master film makers of the art cinema, but the focus of this essay is on the Indian Popular cinema.

What is the need for a study on Indian Popular cinema?

“Popular cinema is still a dominant force in India providing a useful site for the negotiation of cultural
meaning and values and inviting the vast mass of movie goers to participate in the ongoing conversation
of cultural modernities. Consequently, the domain of popular cinema is one that merits close study and
analysis”.

Dissanayake identifies that Indian popular cinema is something that influences the masses.

It plays a major role in the creation of narratives and images in the masses. Popular cinema informs and
influences the people. It plays a major role in the formation of their choices and decisions. Hence popular
cinema needs a close study.

Indian popular cinema was once deemed meretricious(tasteless) and academic community never gave it
serious attention. New critics chose to see it as having discursive significance ( as a discourse). For them
it was an instance of modern cultural production. It plays an important role as vehicle disseminating
ideology, power, cultural modernity, nationality and state formation.

Major scholars of this thought: Ashish Nandy, Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ravi Vasudevan,
Madhava Prasad, Sumita Chakravarthy, Sara Dickey and M S S Pandian.

How to understand Indian Popular cinema?

Dissanayake wants to understand the popular Indian cinema in the light of cultural modernity ( )

Marshall Berman “Modernity is a highly complex phenomenon that touches on all aspects of human
existence, ushering in profound changes in society and in cultural perceptions”.

Dissanayake’s approach is to understand Indian popular cinema in four main discourses related to
modernity.

1. Socio-economic.

2. Cognitive.

3. Political

4. Experiential and phenomenological.

Socio-economic discourse analysis the changes modernity has brought the approach to life by
understanding phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization, massification, expansion of transport,
proliferation of technology and the emergence of consumer culture.
Cognitive discourse seeks to focus attention on questions of rationality with particular emphasis on
instrumental rationality. (Instrumental rationality refers to the pursuit of a particular end goal, by any
means necessary.) Instrumental rationality is considered as preferred mode of cognition (intellectual way
of knowing and understanding) human society. i.e., how we construct and comprehend human society.

Political dimension understands the spread of secularism as a thought and how modern confronts
traditional values.

Experientiality and phenomenological addresses the new perspectives developing in the society, which is
brought in by rapidly evolving contexts of living and sensory experience.

In the context of Indian popular cinema the sensory and experiential dimension is the most significant. It
draws attention to the discourse of cinema, newer perspectives and frames of intelligibility and the
transformations that are incessantly taking place within the texture of urban experience.

To understand the appeal and the social meaning of Indian popular cinema we have to look into the nature
of cinema. The moving and flickering image (the tempo, fragmentation, chaos and over-stimulations
brought by the images) and the cultural dislocations [(displacement of the individuals) brought in by
changes in the living environment (migration from rural areas to metropolis)] needs special attention in
this respect.

Popular Indian Cinema and the Masses (People)

Popular Indian cinema reflects the ways in which Indian movie-goers become both objects and subjects of
the process of cultural modernization. Culture is a product of history, politics and geography. They are
sites in which meanings relevant to everyday life are constantly made, unmade and remade. Popular
cinema in India has to be understood in relation to the dynamics of modernization as it interferes with the
cultural consciousness of Indian people. Ashish Nady observes that popular cinema provides the movie-
goers with the cultural categories, i.e., it provides them the necessary tools to make sense of their lives.

Indian Popular Cinema and Slums

“The popular cinema is the slum’s point of view of Indian politics and society and, for that matter, the
world.”- Ashish Nandy

Urban slums is the world of deracinated (uprooted from one's natural geographical, social, or cultural
environment.) people. They are displaced individuals, uprooted from tradition, compelledto loosen their
bonds to community and caste. The current generation of people we find in slums are the second or third
generation of economic migrants.

How slums become a trope to Indian popular films?

Two processes according to Nandy.

First.
The slum recreates the lost and imagined village in new form. It has its own classicism, but not as you
find in the Sanskrit age. It is the outcome of classicism adapted and transformed to suit the imperatives of
a mass market.

Second.

Slum dwellers create their own culture out of the welter of experiences available to them.

There is an amalgamation of people, culture, communities, ethnicity and world views in a slum. People
recreate their lost village, fading past in their new neighborhood. The slum is a curious mix, of the elite
and the subaltern, of the classic and the pop. Nandy says it is an odd mix of complete opposites. This gets
resembled in Indian popular cinema. The urban slums and popular-commercial films in India are direct
outcomes of modernity.

Genealogy of Indian Popular Cinema

1. Influence of Hindu Epics.

Indian cinema is greatly influenced by Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabaratha. The first surviving
Indian feature film Raja Harischandra (1913) was based on Ramayana. Plots have been borrowed
extensively from the two epics. Themes like motherhood, femininity, patrimony and revenge are repeated
in Indian popular film following the pioneering films like Mother India, Awaara and Zanzeer. Indian
popular cinema is unique as a cinematic discourse in the art of narration with its endless circularities,
digressions and detours, and plots within plots. Instead of the linear and logical narrative of Hollywood
cinema you find the narrative discourse of Ramayana and Mahabaratha imitated in Indian popular
cinema. Ramayana and Mahabharatha were ideological instruments employed for the expansion of the
structures of belief approved by the ruling classes. The popular Indian cinema legitimizes its own also we
can see the Indian popular film connected with the epics. As cinema did not challenge the guiding rules of
the major narratives, it adopted its grand narrative. We cannot overlook the influence of the two epics in
the structuralisation of the Indian popular film.

2. Influence of Sanskrit theatre.

Classical Indian theatre has its impact on the construction of Indian Popular cinema. Classical Indian
plays were spectacular dance dramas. They were not tightly organized like the western classical drama.
They were non naturalistic and stylized, and invited the imaginative participation from the audience.
These plays can be described as heroic romantic comedies with a pronounced lyricism. The aim of the
classical Indian playwright was the generation of dominant aesthetic emotion (rasa) in the audience.
Being performed in courts, its informing ideology was on keeping intact and reinforcing the existing
social order. By twelfth century classical Sanskrit theater lost its prominence. It leads to the emergence of
regional folk dramas. These regional developments were influenced by the Sanskrit theatre. These folk
theatres make its presence felt in the melodramas of popular cinema. The deployment of humor, music,
dance, the structure of the narratives, the informing melodramatic imagination in the folk drama has its
impact on the Indian popular cinema.

3. Influence of the Parsi Theatre

Parsi theatre came into existence after the nineteenth century. They took up drama both in Gujaratthi and
Hindustani. Parsi theatre companies toured the country performing before packed audiences. Elphinstone
Dramatic Company of Bombay was one of the famous drama groups of the day. Stylistically, these plays
displayed an odd mixture of realism and fantasy, narrative and spectacle, music and dance, lively
dialogues and ingenious stagecraft, all amalgamated within the accepted narrative discursivities of
melodrama. According to critics these plays were hybrid, vulgar, sensational and melodramatic. These
plays bear an uncanny resemblance to the generality of commercially- oriented films made in India. In
terms of thematic, visuality, cultural inscription, narrative discourse and modes of presentation, Parsi
theatre and commercial cinema share much common ground.

4. Influence of Hollywood.

Hollywood cinema has a deep influence on Indian film makers. Impressed by Hollywood movies Indian
film makers adapted it to suit the local tastes, sensibilities and conventions. Imitating the technical
resources of Hollywood , Indian film makers created a their own world of magic and make-believe.
Charlie Chaplin was a massive influence on Raj Kapoor. Hollywood musicals provided the basic
framework for many Indian film makers. Indian film makers used song and dance sequences as natural
and logical articulation of situations and feelings emanating from dynamics of day to day life. The
Hollywood musicals resorted to its use when the subject demanded that treatment. Indian film makers
differed from Hollywood by ignoring set rules of Hollywood cinema. The popular Indian cinema was not
concerned about the illusion of reality which American film makers sought to create.

5. Influence of MTV.

Music videos are comparatively newer force to influence Indian popular cinema. Growing exposure of
Indian audiences to MTV has made Indian film makers to rely on it as a stylistic innovation. The pace of
films, quick cutting, newer forms of presenting dance sequences, and the camera angles that we seen in
Indian popular cinema now is a direct influence of MTV. Modern film directors of popular Indian cinema
are seeking to establish newer connections between technology and entertainment resulting in newer
circuits of desire and pleasure.

As we explore the genealogy of popular Indian cinema what we find is not a smooth confluence
of diverse forces leading to an elegant unity but a problematic coexistence of different influences within
the evolving matrix of cultural modernity.