This book, I have had to repeatedly remind myself as I wrote it, is meant as an ‘Introduction to’ and not a ‘History of’. The distinction is especially important when you see what it does not have, the people it should mention and films that it should list, and all the other things that it should do if it were a proper history. There are simple answers I could come up with for why not: we are looking at a very large phenomenon and there is only so much that a slim book can do. And then there are more complicated answers: such as, the very term that I am seeking to introduce, ‘Indian Cinema’, is contentious. It is so because the idea of ‘India’ that its cinema inherits, and within which it fashions a role for itself, is itself a deeply fraught one.
Perhaps the biggest problem I faced when trying to work out what to put into 35,000 words was the shifting, elusive nature of my topic. Indian cinema has meant very different things over its history. The cinema flourished between the Wars in an India that bore almost no political relation to the India that came to be soon after. When it descended upon the subcontinent, famously at a screening by the Lumière Brothers’ Marius Sestier at the glittering Watson’s Hotel on 7 July 1896, it was in a Bombay that was still one of colonial Britain’s leading seaports; like Hong Kong, an entrepôt city, the Empire’s gateway into the vast Indian hinterland. As it settled down along with the trade and industry of this city, the cinema faced a challenge it would engage with throughout the century: of how to cater to this hinterland in all its size and sheer variety.
By the mid-1920s, Bombay studios were intertitling their silent films in as many as six Indian languages. One of the city’s leading studios, the Imperial Film Company, made the world’s first Iranian film alongside producing movies in Burmese and Malay. In 1931, when sound was introduced, twenty-eight features were made in three languages, which the very next year trebled to eighty-four features and, more significantly, doubled the number of languages to seven.
If ‘India’ was already, by the time the movies arrived, an omnibus term including numerous nationalities and several claims for autonomy, the arrival of Independence, far from providing any settled definition to the term ‘Indian cinema’, would only complicate matters further. With Independence came Partition, and colonial India first split into two (with Pakistan) and, after 1971 with the birth of Bangladesh, into three countries. Although Partition devastated the film industries of several cities, what was left as ‘India’ nevertheless still named twenty-two languages under its Constitution’s Eighth Schedule, several of which would assemble, with various degrees of success, their own local cinemas. Among the most successful were languages that were awarded, in 1956, their own states. Many of these regional states, especially the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, have full-scale local movie industries with an output that exceeds that of most West European countries.
In political terms, the Partition of India also uprooted, destroyed, and occasionally rehoused several movie industries in minority northern languages as diverse as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Dogri. In other regions that were rebuilt after the Second World War, the post-Independence cinemas often came with concerns far removed from any commitment to the idea of an ‘Indian’ nation. Within the boundaries of the new state, several emergent ‘regional-nations’ put the cinema to use in assembling a national identity for themselves in the way that India itself never did. The cinema of Tamil Nadu, to take only one example, would speak for a putative Tamil state in a way that no cinema did for the Indian nation-state. Beyond the nation, even as the Empire fragmented, one of the world’s largest instances of mass migration took place, as gigantic subcontinental populations moved both East (to South East Asian countries) and West (Africa, Europe, and the USA/Canada), and new diasporic communities took the cinema with them as standing for cultural memory recalling home.
Through the often complex and fraught history of the 20th century, Indian audiences took to the cinema like the proverbial duck to water, with a scale and intensity that often defies explanation. India, uniquely perhaps in the former Third World, inherited from its colonial era an autonomous movie industry and even to some degree an indigenous production infrastructure, assembled with very little support from the state. Many post-colonial nations would have viewed this as a major asset. But unlike Africa, Latin America, and South East Asia, where an integral part of nation-building was the founding of a properly national cinema, independent India’s anxieties about its prolific film factories often bore uncanny similarity to those of the late colonial administration that it replaced in 1947.
In 1971, the year Bangladesh was formed, India’s output of 433 feature films made it officially the world’s largest film producing country. Forty years later, in 2011, figures by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics show that it continued to be the largest film producer with a staggering 1,255 features, which meant that roughly one out of every five feature films worldwide was made within the present nation-state that we call India. This does not include films labelled ‘Indian’ and made in the larger India of the inter-war period before Independence, or in countries as diverse as the UK, Canada, Kenya, and Fiji.
Within these staggering numbers is a disquieting fact. The same statistics also showed that although that year India saw 2.9 billion admissions into theatres (the largest in the world and over double the 1.28 billion admissions in the USA), in terms of box-office revenue India ranked a poor sixth. While the USA claimed 42 per cent of the world’s revenue, India’s paying audience yielded revenue that was behind even France and Britain. More damagingly, of the thirty ‘most popular’ films worldwide listed by UNESCO using a variety of indicators, India had only one film (My Name is Khan) in 2010 and none in 2011, in a year that listed films from Georgia, Lithuania, Laos, and Serbia.
If there is one emblematic condition that defines the Indian cinema, it lies in its struggles for legitimacy. It is admittedly popular, and apparently capable of a mass audience such as the 20th century has perhaps never seen, but can this audience ever translate into a stable, coherent, and above all legitimate market? Possessing a vast cultural popularity that the cinema has been unable to monetize on its own, it has straddled other, more ‘grey’, sectors, both financial and political, leading to yet further questions about just what the film ‘industry’ comprised if taken as a whole, and how to make this industry accountable.
This is not a new problem. Indeed, it has existed through the history of India’s cinema, and has been dealt with by late colonial authority, by the independent nation-state that was born in 1947 and focused on industrial development, and by a ‘new’ and globalized India that many say was born in the early 1990s. On each occasion problems have been identified and solutions found, but when we view this cinema over its century-old existence, there is a tired sameness to the ‘problem of cinema’ as each era defines it. There is even some doubt as to whether its latest resolution, the Bollywood creative economy, isn’t yet again an instance of the old saying that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
In this short introduction to the Indian cinema, I have tried to fashion a way by which we may approach this fascinating topic so that we neither lose its pulsating complexity, nor any uninitiated readers who might have hoped for a rather simpler history. All I say in my defence is that the Indian cinema is like no other, and that I am introducing a cinema that challenges basic tenets of the very concept of film, and which may well be—even keeping the hyperbole down—India’s most spectacular contribution to modern life.
Finally, a few notes: I have, in deference to non-Indian readers, translated as many of the titles of films as I could, but I have desisted from doing so when films referred to proper nouns. I have not attempted to translate when a translation makes no sense, and I urge readers to view such instances as also proper nouns of a sort. I have retained the standard Indian usage of lakh (100,000) and crore (10 million) but also given their metric equivalent, and in converting Indian Rupees into US Dollars I have used exchange rates prevalent at the time to which the reference is made. The major filmmaking centres of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta—renamed Mumbai (in 1995), Chennai (in 1996), and Kolkata (in 2001), respectively—have been referred to by their old names when speaking of earlier times, and their new ones as we come into the present.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Bangalore, December 2015