It is with pleasure that we present before you a revised and updated second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. The book’s indices, filmographies and film entries have now been brought up to 1995. We present new entries on stars, directors and composers who have made their mark in the 1990s, and a vastly expanded section of film entries where we have especially covered mainstream productions from the 1970s-90s. These are films that are most likely to be in current circulation, on video, television or in your neighbourhood theatre. We have carried out many thousands of corrections on the first edition, some major, others mostly to do with spellings, dates - many film titles have now been re-dated in terms of their actual completion (rather than their dates of release) - and the identification of dubbed films and multilingual productions. We also include a new feature: an exhaustive index of names other than the ones featuring as independent entries. Although nowhere near the end, we believe in all this that we have taken a major step towards that elusive category ‘definitive’.
When we handed over the first edition to the publishers in mid-1994, all those who had worked on the book were aware of the priorities of its time. Our focus was then on the history of Indian cinema, especially on its relatively less chronicled periods: the silent era, the early years of sound, the major directors, stars, writers and composers who were noted figures in their times but often forgotten by subsequent generations. Furthermore, we tried to present as far as possible within the pages of a single book the vast panorama of the six major language industries and the nine other languages in which films are commonly made, covering not only the well known titles but also the key film-making personnel of these regions. This often called for some kind of loose system of allocating space to all ‘language’ cinemas proportionate to their production scale. Finally, we addressed the major problems presented by the archives: how to use current concerns of theory to ‘read into’ surviving material in situations where the films themselves haven’t always survived and information is scanty, scattered and often contradictory.
Having put this together, the next stage was to put this material into the public arena, and generate some kind of dialogue with interested readers and authorities.
We always expected a controversial response, but never one as overwhelming as we got, especially in India, but also in many other parts of the world where the book is being used by teachers and researchers of Indian film. In India, the commonest response featured extensive, often heated, discussions around why certain names - usually of stars - did not feature in the book. It must be remembered in this context that some 23 million Indians go to the movies every day, that a goodly percentage of these would consider themselves, validly, authorities on the subject of this book, and further, that certain kinds of actors often represent an essential constituency, and are crucially implicated in the assertion of their fans’ identities.
Many readers responded to our call for this project to become something of a collaborative venture, helped with their knowledge on certain areas, with comments on certain perhaps unduly critical turns of phrase, with otherwise scarce information enabling us to update this project as a whole. To these readers, and to the dozens of reviewers of the first edition in India, Pakistan, Britain, Australia and the USA who also came up with often useful responses, our sincere gratitude.
Our gratitude especially extends to the team that assembled the first edition, and went to work on the second. We also welcome to the team several new, younger, contributors and consultants who joined us, notably in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Oriya cinemas. Their names feature in our updated acknowledgements list. Many of our senior authorities went through the book in the greatest possible detail, and we must especially reiterate our gratitude to Virchand Dharamsey, Harish Raghuvanshi and V.A.K. Ranga Rao in this regard.
Most gratifying perhaps, at least partly as a result of the work that went into this book along with the debates its publication has sparked, other initiatives appear to have received a new burst of energy. In terms of research, DataKino’s computerised data bank housed at the National Film Development Corporation is set up on a clearly more comprehensive scale than could have been achieved in one book. Further, the success of the first edition contributed to providing a new space for writing on the cinema, and to allied events such as conferences and workshops in the relatively recent discipline of film studies. It is this development, and the nature of demands that theorists and researchers of the future and arising from the new disciplines that are currently in the process of formation and stabilisation, that will no doubt determine the future directions this Encyclopaedia project will take. Perhaps future, computerised, and eventually on-line publication will allow both an expansion of the space at our disposal and permit newer search modes suitable both to researchers and cinephiles alike.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha/Paul Willemen
August 1998