Chapter 4
The new cinemas
The cinema secedes
In 1956, a decade after Independence, India divided its regional states along linguistic lines. This decision was loaded with political dynamite, opening up fraught histories that went back well over a century.
When it became a republic in 1950, India gave itself a new Constitution. This document claimed the new nation to be a ‘Union of States’ and grouped the states that made up the country into different categories, often using colonial divisions. These divisions included naming former princely states, or small independent kingdoms that had been a part of India only because of treaties they had signed with the British, many of whom were still unsure as to how, or even if, they wanted to be a part of India.
This was never going to be a solution to the main problem that India now faced, which was that several of these regions, possessing a coherent linguistic identity in a way India itself never did, also possessed local histories of nationalism that could simply not be in any easy way accommodated into their Indian variant. Local identities now demanded autonomous recognition. To accede to such demands was however a perilous path, given that several regional nationalisms were sceptical of and, occasionally, even directly opposed to their parent Indian version.
At any rate, in 1956 the States Reorganization Act was passed, and a first lot of fourteen states came into being, defined mainly along linguistic lines, along with six union territories. Since then to now, over the past seventy years since Independence and following many political battles, this list has doubled to twenty-nine states.
A major new state of 1956 was Madras. After Independence, the former Madras Presidency had briefly become the Madras state, but in 1956 it would lose a substantial part of its holdings as it was linguistically reorganized into a state of Tamil-speaking people. A decade later, in 1967 the Tamil nationalist party the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (or DMK, literally translated as federation for the Progress of Dravidians, the peoples of South India) overthrew the Congress and came to power. And an entirely new career emerged for popular sub-nationalism, and with it, a new career for the cinema.
The DMK’s origins went back to the late 19th century, when writers like the Tamil poet Subramanya Bharati scaled up the politics of reform to advocate full-blown Tamil nationalist autonomy. In 1944, the separatist Dravida Kazhagam came into being and later called for India’s first Independence Day in 1947 to be declared a day of mourning.
Two years after Independence, the politician—and, more importantly, eminent playwright and film scenarist—C. N. Annadurai broke away to found the DMK. Having done so, he set up, as the propaganda arm of this party, a filmmaking process that must be seen as one of the great moments of 20th-century propaganda cinema anywhere. The first film in this genre was adapted by Annadurai from his own play Velaikkari/The Maid (1949). Here he codified an elaborately plotted and highly charged melodramatic idiom promoting an iconoclastic ‘rationalism’ and an anti-Brahmin, Tamil-nationalist ideology. Subsequent films incorporated numerous references to the DMK Party symbols and colours, anagrams of party leaders’ names, and characters reciting whole passages from Annadurai’s political speeches.
His successor was the even more formidable figure of M. Karunanidhi, who still leads the DMK at the time of writing. Karunanidhi scripted Manthiri Kumari/The Minister’s Daughter (1950), a ‘folklore’ film that brought the future superstar-politician M. G. Ramachandran (MGR) his first commercial success. Karunanidhi then wrote the most famous DMK film ever, Parasakthi/The Goddess (1952), the debut of another major Tamil star, Sivaji Ganesan. All of these films were made within the mainstream industry and, often starring MGR or Ganesan, were massive commercial successes. MGR himself was a member of the DMK between 1953 and 1972.
MGR’s initial persona was apparently modelled on Douglas Fairbanks, but it would grow into new dimensions of political as well as physical invincibility (vanquishing tigers and righting all wrongs) identified with the people and promoting the DMK’s political programme. After the 1960s, he also turned to more realistic fantasies in a contemporary setting, often playing a member of an oppressed class: peasant, fisherman, rickshaw-puller, gardener, and taxi driver.
As I write, the state is run by the former film star Jayalalitha, who began her career starring in MGR’s films, and now runs what she later called the All India Anna DMK. Film personalities have had an unbroken run of being Chief Ministers of that state from 1967 to date.
Regional states, regional nations
The DMK film did not only depart from the prevalent Bombay mode of the late 1940s‐1950s; it seceded from the default nationalism of the Bombay-based ‘all-India film’. It was an aggressive repudiation of the Bombay cinema, in a way that made political sense: this was after all a part of the Party’s stated political repudiation of Hindi.
It was however only the most prominent of several further secessions from the idiom of the national. The cinema now found itself radicalized on a number of fronts, becoming the vanguard of a variety of challenges to the Indian state.
The DMK itself would provide a benchmark for other nationalisms that sought some degree of federal autonomy from an increasingly centralized Indian state. A second challenge would emerge on the Left, with the birth of extreme-Left Naxalite movements in different parts of India. The term itself, ‘Naxalite’, was borrowed from a peasant insurrection that took place in the village of Naxalbari, Bengal, also in 1967, but was extended to peasant insurgencies led by extremist Marxist-Leninist (later Maoist) groups in several eastern, central, and southern Indian states. These insurrections would prove influential to much of the New Indian Cinema at this time.
Many state governments, set up through contentious, sometimes deadly, divisions of former provinces, saw disturbances that were sometimes not too different from those of India’s Partition. Several had difficulties setting up credible governance structures that would give them control over their territory, such control mechanisms often flying in the face of historical trade practices that were incapable of respecting any such divisions. The proposed division of the former Bombay state into a bilingual Maharashtra and Gujarat, with both states sharing Bombay as their capital, was abandoned in 1960 when police firing on pro-Marathi agitators at the city’s downtown Flora Fountain area saw over a hundred people killed.
For several years, this entire process of dividing India linguistically was simply ignored by the Bombay-centred film exhibition trade. To them, for decades after Independence, India’s map remained the colonial one. All of its territories were defined primarily through their revenue-earning potential, in turn linked to the degree of organized distribution and accountability, and subdivided into A-, B-, and C-class centres.
This would only change as regional states began putting their own respective nationalisms in place, often through creating literary canons, glorious pasts, and founding fathers. Some of these assigned key roles for their cinemas within the nation-building process, encouraging local industries to shift their business to their respective state capitals and away from Bombay and Madras. Most states that sought to do this were only too aware of the political precedent that had been set by the DMK.
The regional new cinema
In 1967, the regional state of Kerala gave a new direction to the role of the cinema in national formation: the industrial-nationalist route. Home to the relatively small Malayalam (this being the state language) film industry, Kerala had a few small studios, but still relied primarily on production infrastructure in Madras.
What Kerala did was to give its local industry a sub-national cinematic identity that was closer to the tradition of national cinemas, as originally defined in Europe: of a combination of state subsidy for local productions, the creation of infrastructure, and local protection from other film industries. The Kerala State Film Development Corporation (KSFDC) was in 1975 upgraded to a Public Sector Undertaking, with the explicitly nationalist objectives of ‘facilitating the production and promotion of Malayalam Cinema’ as against film production that was ‘virtually monopolised by a few studios in and around Madras’ (quoting from its website). By 1978, as many as 86 of the 126 films made in Malayalam were made entirely within the state (see Figure 8).
8. Sharada in Adoor Goplakrishnan’s debut Malayalam feature Swayamvaram/One’s Own Choice (1972).
Kerala was followed by similar explorations of regional-nationalist New Cinema initiatives, created through an industrial route, in states as varied as Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Manipur, Punjab and Orissa. Many of these states, in yoking their New Cinema to their self-definition of state, produced many and diverse reasons for the kind of cinema they wanted made: from anti-feudal films excoriating traditional elites, to showcasing the virtues of new regional-state policy.
A new matrix of cinema‐state relations now emerged that the parent Indian nation-state had been unable to forge. New arguments came about for why the cinema needed support within state industrial policy, and new institutions were set up to address that linkage, including state film archives, state film chambers of commerce, and state film development corporations. Local film histories were written, official journals published providing essential information about their industries—lists of censored films, releases, and other data—and a history of local cinemas was made available for teaching, that celebrated their own film pioneers, from Assam’s Jyotiprasad Agarwala to Kannada’s Gubbi Veeranna.
For the South Indian states, the New Cinema movement was a second go at the regional cinema trophy, of getting the cinemas in their languages to move en masse to their new state capitals. Several film producers refused to do so, forgoing the possibility of subsidies in favour of the familiarity of established infrastructures in Bombay and Madras. The ones that did, as for example the Telugu cinema industry that was induced to shift to Hyderabad, the new capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh (and defined as the home of Telugu-speaking peoples), often moved because of both the pull of increased access to brand new regional markets, and the push of significant local financial investments, coming from the peasant economies of coastal Andhra. While some states sought a quality cinema to emerge in their language, others, like Andhra Pradesh, were only concerned with, in the words of Telugu film historian S. V. Srinivas, ‘bringing the industry “home”, no matter what it produced’.
By the 1970s, a new cultural politics, inviting migrant and even expatriate regional capital to come home, had created a new frontier for the movie industry to play a further role in globalization from below. Long before new metropolitan centres such as Bangalore and Hyderabad advertised themselves as viable investment destinations for global finance, low-end investment was pouring from diverse sources into regional film industries, just as capital in the years after the First World War had once flowed from Lahore and elsewhere across Punjab into colonial and then independent Bombay. As that money had then presented challenges to both colonial and early independent India, so this money now presented challenges to these regional states.
The most spectacular example was that of Kerala’s migrants to the Gulf states. The economic boom within the Gulf countries reached its peak between 1979 and 1984. The Malayalam movie industry became a destination for hot money looking for quick-return (if high-risk) short-term investments. Through the 1970s and 1980s, investment in Kerala was primarily in transport trade, hotels and restaurants, banking and real estate, and in non-banking financial institutions which would earn notoriety in Kerala as ‘Blade Companies’.
By the mid-1980s, the Malayalam film industry had become saturated by money that came from the Gulf. Malayalam cinema, known until then mainly for low-budget films and its tradition of auteurs, now began to be made on plush artificially constructed sets showcasing a neo-rich class. ‘Five-star hotels and bars, melodramatic acting styles and garish make-up represented the excesses of the new economy’, writes film historian Ratheesh Radhakrishnan.
Different states had different levels of success in getting their cinemas to take on the new responsibilities of state formation. Some were able to establish internationally renowned New Cinema initiatives with regional state subsidy, as films by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Girish Karnad, B. V. Karanth, and Girish Kasaravalli, all beneficiaries of New Cinema subsidies, began receiving global recognition for their work.
Most of these filmmakers attempted somewhat edgier works entering darker and more disturbing spaces of national formation. Gopalakrishnan chose to locate his reformism in a discomfiting focus on the former princely state of Travancore, which had had a delayed entry into the nationalist mainstream and a sudden transformation from a feudal state ruled by Dewan C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyer into one run by a Communist government. This acceleration of history created, he argued, a break in Kerala’s historical narrative. It was this break that often animated his films: e.g. his portrayal of the Nair community of former rent collectors, whose way of life was being left behind by a changing world, in his Elippathayam/The Rat Trap (1981) and of the Communist movement itself in Mukha Mukham/Face to Face (1984) and Mathilukal/The Walls (1989).
In Karnataka, both Karnad and Karanth emerged from the new Kannada theatre, but even more so perhaps from the modernist literature then pioneered by major Kannada novelist U. R. Ananthamurthy. Karnad both wrote and acted in a seminal New Cinema venture, Pattabhirama Reddy’s Samskara/The Rites (1970), filming Ananthamurthy’s landmark book of the same name. Shot on location in the south-central Indian mountains of Malnad by a visiting Australian cameraman, this morality tale was set among orthodox upper-caste Madhava Brahmins. When a renegade notorious for eating meat and keeping a low-caste mistress dies, none from his caste are willing to cremate him. The film is pivoted on the ethical dilemmas of a Brahmin scholar (played by Karnad), who cannot find a solution to the problem in the scriptures.
Although both Karnad and Karanth went on to make several major films as well as seminal theatre together, the Navya (or ‘new’) literary-modernist ideology that influenced their work was most explicitly furthered in the cinema by a younger Kannada director Girish Kasaravalli, whose extraordinary debut film Ghatashraddha/The Ritual (1977), made in the wake of Samskara and also based on Ananthamurthy’s writing, extended its critique of Brahminism in several films, many set in the Malnad region so favoured by Karnataka’s modernist writers. Set in the 1920s in a rural orthodox Brahmin Karnataka village, Kasaravalli’s feature tells the story of a child widow through the eyes of a young boy. When the widow becomes pregnant after an affair with a teacher, the boy becomes a horrified witness to her attempts to induce an abortion and then to commit suicide. The climactic moments of the film show her achieve the abortion, helped by an Untouchable, to the sound and images of drunken tribals.
This cinema had an initial impact on the local mainstream industries, and so several regional filmmakers and stars took their cue from the ‘good’ bland melodramas of Hindi filmmakers like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee, who often worked with major movie stars Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan. Regional stars known mainly for historicals and mythologicals were now found doing low-budget stories set in the present, like the Kannada mega-star Rajkumar, who produced and acted in the melodrama Halu Jenu/Milk and Honey (1983), a bittersweet tale involving a Bangalore clerk whose wife is stricken with cancer (the hero-dying-of-cancer genre being then a Hrishikesh Mukherjee staple). Yet other regional stars took their cue from the Bachchan vigilante films, like Chiranjeevi in Telugu, Sathyan and Madhu, and later Mammootty and Mohanlal, in Malayalam. Indeed, to many such stars, getting roles in New Cinema movies, whether melodramas or gritty-realist action movies, was considered highly desirable, being an occasion to display acting skills and a path to ‘national’ respectability via state awards.
By the early 1980s, however, most regional initiatives were facing a problem that had curious similarity to the ones the Bombay cinema had faced after the Second World War. In both situations the problem was ‘new money’: now, as then, a combination of agrarian capital and migrant remittances, such money clashing directly with state-government efforts to clean up and reform film industries. Despite major state investment, several regions that had seen a boom in production through the 1960s saw a levelling off and even a drop in production. Kannada, for example, jumped from twelve films in 1961 to thirty-seven in 1970, but then went down to twenty in 1972. Malayalam, which showed a fivefold jump from six in 1961 to thirty-one in 1965, showed a much more sedate increase, going from forty-three in 1970 to forty-seven in 1972.
Films of ‘good standard’
And meanwhile, what of Bombay? Was there ever any such thing as an Indian—as against a Tamil, Bengali, or Malayalam—national cinema? As we see, there never was, but it wasn’t for want of effort.
As far back as 1956, on invitation by the Government of India, British film commentator Marie Seton gave a series of talks in India, later published by the Indian Ministry of Education as The Film as an Educational Force in India. Eight years later, in a second book commissioned by the National Council of Educational Resources and Training (NCERT) and titled Film Appreciation: The Art of Five Directors, Seton shortlisted a canon of world cinema that would, she felt, be appropriate for India: Flaherty, Eisenstein, de Sica, David Lean, and Satyajit Ray. The world would take India’s cinema seriously only when India understood that the cinema’s true purpose was to produce universal values, she said. Her own book showed how such cinema could be made in two easy steps: a film ‘becomes universal in its appeal (a) when it presents an important social or political theme, and (b) when it is nationally true to the country where it is created’.
Easy as it was to understand these points, the problem was that India apparently didn’t know yet how to make such cinema. Two decades later, in 1975, Seton apparently felt that barring a few names, the general situation was still unchanged from what it had been in the 1950s. She attacked an apparently ‘very good’ Hindi film—Gulzar’s classic Aandhi/The Storm (1975)—precisely for its inability to be ‘good’. Made the same year as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a State of Emergency, allowing the Indian Government unprecedented powers, Aandhi had made direct allusions to Mrs Gandhi in its fictional protagonist. The film had faced censorship issues. It was Bengali superstar Suchitra Sen’s last Hindi film. It was also a major musical success, with several popular Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar duets. None of these things apparently mattered to Seton. Although she concedes that the film has ‘a sharp authenticity’, it, alas, loses it all when it goes into flashbacks, ‘each descending into a deeper commercial sop to the romantic, the coy, the sexually titillating, and in came the inevitable songs’. Seton sighs, ‘What might have been a really good film fell to pieces. A second rate film is one thing. But a good film ruined for alleged box office demands, is another.’ And then she adds:
This film pinpoints the acute problem facing film-makers in India today. In the twenty years since I first came here, the entertainment film has matured from every technical point of view. Many films on the technical level are every bit as well made as the best made films of any country in the world. But the conventions long established by producers, distributors and exhibitors remain rigid and virtually unchanged.
For a good two decades after Seton’s book, the Indian government had attempted to support the making of a ‘good’ cinema in her sense of the term. Through the 1960s, the Bombay-headquartered Film Finance Corporation, meant to offer low-interest loans to the mainstream industry, extended loans for around fifty features to films made in Bombay but also elsewhere in the country.
In 1969 came a change. The Film Finance Corporation initiated its own variation of the New Indian Cinema, under the directive that it ‘develop the film in India into an effective instrument for the promotion of national culture, education and healthy entertainment [b]y granting loans for modest but off-beat films of talented and promising people in the field’.
The policy yielded instant results as a whole generation of new filmmakers was allowed to emerge. Some, like the Indian cinema’s leading avant garde director Mani Kaul, were completely new to the cinema; others, such as Bengal’s Mrinal Sen, already established but now able to give their cinema a new turn.
It also led to major internal dissensions. Although Sen qualified as a ‘good’ filmmaker of the sort Seton may have approved, an earlier Bengali film Akash Kusum/Up in the Clouds (1965), a tale of a lower-middle-class man (played by Bengali movie star Soumitra Chatterjee) who is exposed as a confidence trickster, had sparked a major debate. Sen, who wanted the film to ‘physically look youthful’, had scripted in street scenes, still frames, voiceovers, and emphasis on unrehearsed sound effects, in a way that was a little too anarchic to comfortably fit Seton’s two-step theory of a universal cinema. Satyajit Ray later attacked it for ‘modish narrative devices’, saying that despite showing ‘some lively details of city life’, and despite the filmmakers’ belief ‘that they have made an angry film about struggling youth assailing the bastion of class’, the hero’s behaviour in fact ‘dates back to antiquity’.
On his side, Sen unambiguously downgraded key modernist notions such as artistic ‘originality’ and deployed a wide array of influences from Glauber Rocha’s early work to that of François Truffaut (Akash Kusum) and from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to Argentinian Third Cinema theorists and filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (in his Calcutta trilogy: Interview, Calcutta ’71, and Padatik/The Guerrilla Fighter), Federico Fellini (Akaler Sandhaney/In Search of Famine), and thereafter Robert Bresson (Khandhar/The Ruin).
Even as he did this, Sen was arguably the only major filmmaker to have had a sense of the larger ramifications of the New Cinema movement as a whole, and especially in South India. He made one film in Telugu, one in Oriya, and had planned at least one in Malayalam. Within Calcutta, in his best-known 1970s work, Sen evoked the radical currents of Bengali theatre, achieving a freewheeling style he later described as ‘playing around with tools as often as I could, as a child plays with building blocks’ to ‘violate the outrageously conformist … mainstream of our cinema’.
His political films drew both from the legacies of the Indian People’s Theatre Association and from his key lead player Utpal Dutt’s 1960s theatre, culminating in the Calcutta trilogy made in the wake of the dismantling of the United Front Ministry in Bengal, with massive anti-Left reprisals, especially against Naxalite factions. The films became a cause célèbre as their screenings became meeting-points for Left activists (with Sen’s encouragement) and were raided regularly by the police. The second and best known of these, Calcutta ’71 (1972; the others were Interview, 1970, and Padatik/The Guerrilla Fighter, 1973), recounts three famous Bengali stories by three Bengali authors together with two contemporary episodes, each presenting an aspect of poverty and exploitation: an angry young man on trial in 1971, a rainstorm in a slum in 1933, a lower-middle-class family during the 1943 famine, teenage smugglers in 1953, and, back again in 1971, a middle-class group in a posh hotel.
More challenging was the cinema of Mani Kaul, begun with a loan from the Film Finance Corporation. His debut was Uski Roti/His Bread (1969: the same year as Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome, widely viewed as the other film that launched the New Cinema). Uski Roti adapted a short story by noted Hindi author Mohan Rakesh and was perhaps the first consistently formal experiment in Indian cinema. A burly bus driver travels through the dusty, flat Punjabi countryside. His wife spends long hours waiting for him at the bus-stop with his food packet (see Figure 9). One day her younger sister is sexually molested, causing the wife to arrive late at the bus stop. Her husband is upset by her late arrival, rejects her food, and drives away. She remains standing at the roadside until nightfall.
9. Garima plays the bus driver’s wife Balo in Mani Kaul’s first film Uski Roti/His Bread (1969), widely regarded as having inaugurated the New Indian Cinema.
Kaul’s cinema, as it developed, would become increasingly more experimental. Among its key points of reference were to music (Dhrupad, 1982; Mati Manas/Mind of Clay, 1984; Siddheshwari, 1989), more particularly to the dhrupad form of Indian classical music. He also made extensive reference, in films that worked on the boundary between fiction and documentary, to theories of narrative elaboration derived from Anandvardhan’s Dhwanyaloka, a 9th-century Sanskrit text on aesthetics exploring states of conscious perception.
By 1976, the brief moment of the Film Finance Corporation’s independent cinema policy would be almost over: the Corporation came under withering attack from various quarters. The Government of India’s Parliamentary Committee on Public Undertakings issued a report taking the Corporation to task for not understanding that ‘there is no inherent contradiction between artistic films of good standard and films successful at the box office’, asking it to ensure that henceforth the Corporation satisfy itself that its films ‘have a reasonable prospect of being commercially successful’.
A scant decade after it came into being, by the early 1980s the entire project of the New Cinema was more or less abandoned: and cinema itself was abandoned by governments everywhere as they transferred their patronage to television. The extent of the failure, and the frustration, was reflected in a statement made by the filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee in his capacity as Chairman of the National Film Development Corporation, saying that ‘unhealthy and underhand dealings particularly in the big cities’ are a part of the ‘national distribution and exhibition racket’, and that ‘Until and unless one becomes part of this racket’—and by ‘one’ we presume that he means the government itself—‘it is practically impossible to operate profitably or otherwise in this area of film business’ (all emphases mine).
Mukherjee, whose own middle-class movies had set a specific standard of social acceptability for the New Cinema, was now apparently conceding defeat in a bizarre war with perpetrators of ‘underhand dealings’ in a ‘national distribution and exhibition racket’. The ‘racket’ concerned practices that take us back to the late silent cinema, and the war that the state mounted on it from at least the Second World War.
1975: Deewar/The Wall
In June 1975, the Indira Gandhi government declared that a grave emergency had arisen, whereby the security of India was being threatened by external disturbances, which justified the suspension of normal political processes in favour of extraordinary powers to the executive, and the arrest of her political opponents and detention of political prisoners under something called a Maintenance of Internal Security Act. This was a cataclysmic event in modern Indian history. As with the Emergency itself, so with the film industry’s involvement in it, much of the description has been typically lurid and rumour-filled, including stories of how the entire Indian film industry was held to ransom by those in power. The excessively harsh treatment of the film industry, especially the Bombay-based Hindi cinema, was also in those days linked to a crackdown on an offshore black economy widely believed to be committed to state destabilization: smugglers such as the famous Haji Mastan (the apocryphal origin of Amitabh Bachchan’s character Vijay in Yash Chopra’s Deewar/The Wall, 1975).
There was, however, another side to the Indian state’s involvement with the cinema. By 1971, the year of the war that led to the formation of Bangladesh, the radical movements that had seen perhaps the most tumultuous years in India’s recent political history saw their expression in an explicitly avant garde cinema. Mrinal Sen had just made his Calcutta films, Ritwik Ghatak his last great epics Titash Ekti Nadir Naam/A River Named Titash (1973) and Jukti Takko aar Gappo/Reason, Debate and a Story (1974), and Mani Kaul debuted with his first feature, Uski Roti.
It was also a time when the state sought to make some rather drastic interventions in the film industry as a whole. A major Parliamentary Estimates Committee Report in 1974 offered its diagnosis of what was wrong and what needed doing. India, it noted, had a massive industry. It employed a lot of people. It could do great things, if only it developed itself properly. India makes over 400 films annually, has an investment of Rs 180 crore (US $2.3 billion at prevailing rates), employs over 200,000 people, and contributes Rs 70 crore (US $90 million) annually in taxes. The report unambiguously concluded that the problem was the nature of money entering that economy, the prime cause of which was the lack of bank and institutional finance. A series of drastic solutions were proposed: to rationalize entertainment tax, to reform and regulate stardom in cinema, to encourage dubbing between Indian languages, and so on.
The state was willing to help. The problem was the industry’s continued refusal to want to improve: it was as though the industry was still saying to its government, just as Ardeshir Irani had said to the colonial government nearly sixty years previously, in reply to whether ‘some power’ could be given to the government ‘to see that you produce good films’: ‘No, no power. We don’t want any control of the government over that.’ Now, as then, the film industry wanted the respectability that only a state could give it, but it did not want state control. Or rather, it seemed incapable of functioning under state control. This also effectively meant that the cinema would remain—from colonial times to now—impervious to state regulation.
The Emergency itself was politically unpopular, and saw the movie industry en masse turn against the state. Especially damning was Satyajit Ray’s critique of the Emergency, given that he had by now become something of an exemplar for the kind of cinema that the state wanted the Film Finance Corporation to produce. His Jana Aranya/The Middleman (1975) was a grimly comical tale that abandoned the gentle humanism with which he chronicled the follies of his well-meaning but sometimes ill-equipped liberal intelligentsia. Elaborating on the theme of corruption which ran through the entire Calcutta trilogy (Pratidwandi/Adversary, 1970, Seemabaddha/Company Limited, 1971), Ray told of a young man who, unfairly assessed in his graduate examination, cannot get a job and becomes a corporate ‘middleman’ or dalal (also the term for a pimp). Even the mild sympathy Ray felt for the radical movements reflected in Pratidwandi now disappears.
For all its distance from state subsidy, the Bombay movie industry itself was clearly not impervious to state excesses. One of the biggest releases of 1975 was Deewar/The Wall, the best-known script of new generation writer-scenarist Salim-Javed and featuring Amitabh Bachchan in perhaps his single best-known role. Told in flashback, it relies on the familiar plot of two brothers, one of whom becomes an exemplary policeman, and the other a criminal. The bridge between them is the mother they both adore, but whom the criminal brother cannot visit for fear of being arrested.
Bachchan’s importance in this role had accrued from films he had played from 1972, defining a screen persona with no faith in the state or the rule of law; a tragic protagonist named Vijay (meaning Victory) who inevitably dies at the end, with the sole intention of ensuring the happiness of his immediate kin, and those under his protection, before his death. The first of these, Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer/Chains (1972), had Vijay witness the murder of his parents by a faceless killer wearing a chain around his wrist. Haunted by the image of the chain, the adult Vijay becomes a policeman determined to clean up Bombay, but later takes the law into his own hands. Later, in another Mehra film, Muqaddar ka Sikandar/Destiny’s Conqueror (1978), Bachchan reprises his typical persona of the doomed loner with a mother fixation living and fighting in an urban jungle.
All of these films were made either in the radical years preceding, or actually during the Emergency. All of them present a tragic hero who is profoundly out of sympathy with the state. In all of these, the hero knows he can rely on nobody but himself to ensure the happiness of those dependent on him, in the short time he has before he succumbs to his fate. And in all of these films, the police arrive, if at all, only after the deed is done. These films’ mistrust of the modern state, and their protagonists’ belief that kinship laws must prevail over legality, were being made at a very sensitive political and cultural moment.
Making peace
There were occasionally successful efforts to make peace between the state and the film industry. Bombay too produced, as some of the regional cinemas did, occasional low-budget equivalents of the New Cinema which, even if they did not avail themselves of Film Finance Corporation-type loans, certainly sought governmental awards and official festival representation.The greatest success in balancing the mid-1970s Indian state’s expectation of its cinema with the radical turn that both the New Cinema and the mainstream Hindi industry had taken in the years leading up to and including the Emergency, was in the Hindi films of Shyam Benegal. Benegal came from advertising, as Ray had done. His first film Ankur/Seedling (1974), funded by a major advertising agency, had all the trappings of radicalism in a story set in feudal Andhra Pradesh, telling of a newly married urban youth who is sent alone to his rural home amid the feudal zamindars (landlords) of Telangana to look after his ancestral property. Finding himself in the role of the traditional landlord, he seduces Lakshmi, the young wife of a deaf-mute labourer (the independent cinema icon Shabana Azmi in her extremely powerful film debut), and makes her pregnant. Her husband, believing the child to be his, goes to tell the landlord the good news but the landlord, consumed by his guilt and afraid of being exposed, beats the man almost to death. Lakshmi then turns on her former lover with a passionate speech calling for a revolutionary overthrow of feudal rule.
With this film and others made through the late 1970s, Benegal achieved much of what the New Cinema agenda had hoped for. His films return the regional focus back to Bombay’s Hindi cinema, succeeding in carving out a viable national market for low-budget filmmaking (a success partially aided by a major Motion Picture Export Association of America boycott of the Indian market coinciding with the release of his first film, creating, Benegal later said, a gap in the market for an intelligent Indian substitute). Most significantly, Benegal was able to reform and regulate stardom in cinema, introducing a range of low-budget stars, such as Shabana Azmi herself (Figure 10), Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Anant Nag and Girish Karnad—all of whom would not only develop major careers but offer credible alternatives to an independent cinema that could not afford Bombay’s mainstream stars.
10. Shabana Azmi, the schoolmaster’s wife, and Naseeruddin Shah, the youngest of the feudal landlord family, in Shyam Benegal’s Nishant/The Night’s End (1975), set in feudal Telangana.
Benegal’s later features would be closer to what came to be known as the entertainment-led ‘middle cinema’: a popular cinema for an intelligent audience that may have been, for the first time, a realization of what the Film Finance Corporation had meant when it had spoken of the need to support ‘films of good standard’, or what Seton may have meant with her idea of a cinema with a universal appeal. Many of the films were effectively commissioned for clients, e.g. the National Dairy Development Board in Gujarat showcasing the success of its milk cooperatives (Manthan), the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Government of West Bengal showcasing its well-known land-reform movement known as Operation Barga (Aarohan/The Ascent, 1982), the Handloom Co-operatives (Susman/Essence, 1986), Indian Railways (the television serial Yatra/Journey, 1986), or even the Indian state itself, in the case of the 53-episode TV serial based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s book, The Discovery of India (Bharat Ek Khoj, 1988).
Others too managed within the twin registers of success—commercial success on the one hand and aesthetic acceptability within the New Cinema’s definitions on the other—if without Benegal’s direct impact on film policy, An enduringly popular and commercially successful low-budget ‘Bimal Roy’ school of middle-class Bombay filmmaking, represented by the filmmakers Gulzar, Basu Bhattacharya, and Basu Chatterjee, was the most famous. Gulzar himself, though a native Punjabi, was a poet-lyricist often presented as continuing both Bengali and Urdu literary traditions. He started his career writing songs for Roy. His first film, Mere Apne/Our Own, remade Tapan Sinha’s Bengali Apanjan (1968), after which he adapted Bengali authors to make a kind of latter-day mainstream Hindi version of the Bengali literary-cinema form of the boi. Bhattacharya was Bimal Roy’s son-in-law, and his first film was a major commercial success, the Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman musical Teesri Kasam/The Third Vow (1966). He then turned to the New Cinema with two films featuring major movie stars usually focused on the domestic marital discord of upper-class couples.
Chatterjee was one of the founders of the New Cinema with his Sara Akash/The Whole Sky (1969). What he now did was to take the New Cinema into its next era, first with commercially successful low-budget middle-class comedies starring Marathi actor Amol Palekar, and second, when he adapted his formula of rapidly shot sentimental low budget films to television, making some of the first commercially successful soap operas on Indian TV.