The sheer gigantomania of India’s film factories in Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Bangalore and Hyderabad, well known collectively as the world’s largest national film industry, have attracted increasing, if sometimes bemused, attention from film scholars, not least because of the embarrassment of Indian cinema’s near-chronic omission from most global film histories. However, for millions of Indians, wherever they live, a major part of ‘India’ derives from its movies. Here, the cinema has provided, for the better part of this century, the most readily accessible and sometimes the most inventive forms of mass entertainment. In its scale and pervasiveness, film has borne, often unconsciously, several large burdens, such as the provision of influential paradigms for notions of ‘Indianness’, ‘collectivity’ (in the generation of an unprecedented, nationwide, mass-audience), and key terms of reference for the prevailing cultural hegemony. In India, the cinema as apparatus and as industry has spearheaded the development of a culture of indigenous capitalism ‘from below’, and its achievement in doing so continues to influence and determine newer programming and publishing strategies with the proliferation of television channels and mass-circulation fan magazines.
So, at least, goes conventional wisdom about an admittedly complex, and at times bewilderingly vast, realm of cultural production. The prime example of a mass-entertainment industry operating in a nation-building context has clearly been, to date, Hollywood. Dozens of books have been devoted to speculation about, and a few to analyses of, the relationship between notions of ‘America’ and the ‘America’ constructed in the minds of people all over the world, including in the USA, by Hollywood’s products. In the early decades of this century, the dime novel, popular journalism and then film provided not only the key narratives for that relationship, but also its most potent archives: a baggage of political fact and cultural revisionism that was accepted, in its entirety, by US television from the 1960s on.
The ‘India’ of its movies, like Hollywood’s ‘America’, has spawned its own cinephilia, which at its most basic is animated by a distinctive ‘insiderism’, a buddy-culture of speech and body-language that has now expanded and replicated itself into idioms of popular literature with a dynamic of their own via reviews, gossip columns and magazines, publicity materials, novelisations, autobiographies, interviews and fan-club hagiographies. Unlike Hollywood, however, the dynamic of these idioms has not always intersected with that of official, ‘national’ India in any predictable fashion. To some extent, as Paul Willemen’s Preface shows, this has to do with ‘the national’ itself, as ideology and as institution, as State and as imaginary motherland. India has changed dramatically, and more than once in this century. And, as can be imagined, the Indian state has required at different times different things from its popular culture to shore up, defend and/or perpetuate its realm of political and cultural control. To a much greater extent, and again unlike Hollywood, the ‘Indian’ in Indian cinema has all too often been a realm beyond what the State has been able to claim for itself: a complicit, if not always officially legitimate terrain of belonging, simultaneously envied and resented.
Most Indian readers of this book will be familiar with how, in the 1970s, cinephilia relating to mainstream Hindi cinema became an important source for celebrating ‘indigenous’ cultural populism while mounting a free-market attack on the Nehru-Indira Gandhi socialist model of state institutions, and how it influenced a great deal of state policy, especially, of course, policy addressing the Indian film industry itself. They will also recognise this cinephilia’s role over the last two decades in the propagation of a sense of nostalgia, as glossy ‘nostalgia films’ and advertising campaigns invoke genres such as the classic 50s romances, even as political parties’create an aggressive new frontier of right-wing ‘Hindutva’ for indigenous populism. Others may recognise the crucial part this and other kinds of nostalgia have played in the rhetoric of an Asian diaspora, which in turn further informed influential literary as well as cinematic fictions, along with, for instance, the Asian music-video industry and other kinds of actual or pretend political counter-cultures.
This reference book on Indian film has required of its editors and contributors some sensitivity to both the form and the history of this entire cluster of discourses, not least because an amalgam of them has, on several occasions, provided a stand-in for the history of Indian cinema itself, or at least for the kind of history mobilised by influential sectors of the film industry with its press and institutional support systems to perpetuate their economic and cultural claims and to record their achievements. Indeed, so influential is this amalgam of industrial, institutional and cinephiliac discourses, so thoroughly has it saturated the ‘sources’, that it has become virtually impossible consistently to ascertain historical ‘facts’ even as basic as filmographies or credits.
The problem is, of course, not new to India’s historians. From the mid-19th century through to the late colonial period, India’s history was virtually the plaything of an extraordinary variety of ideological movements, from Orientalists to Utilitarians, Evangelists, Reformers, Nationalists and religious revivalists, each presenting history as an idea of ‘the past’, choosing the one most suited to the kind of cultural mobilisation they were propagating in their present. Each of these in turn yielded simplified, uncritical but extraordinarily durable versions of their stand, which in turn not only influenced the popular art of its time but the actual process of history-writing itself. Many of the historians whose methods we adopted have been concerned with placing the ‘fact’ as a central question in their analysis, including, and crucially so, the forms and circumstances of the generation of ‘records’. Referring, for instance, to Ranajit Guha’s manifesto statement, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, and to the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, Edward Said (1988) pointed to the
frequent reference to such things as gaps, absences, lapses, ellipses, all of them symbolic of the truths that historical writing is after all writing and not reality … [which was controlled by] the Indian elite and the British colonizers who ran, as well as wrote the history of, India. In other words, subaltern history in literal fact is a narrative missing from the official story of India.
To supply the narrative requires ‘a deeply engaged search for new documents, a … re-deployment and re-interpretation of old documents, so … that what emerges is a new knowledge’. One of the first historians to do so was D.D. Kosambi, to whom we dedicate this book. In his celebrated Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956/80), Kosambi set out to ‘reconstruct a history without episodes … defined as the presentation, in chronological order, of successive developments in the means and relations of production’, enjoining all historians of India to
remember that no single mode [of production] prevailed uniformly over the whole country at any one time: so it is necessary to select for treatment that particular mode which, in any period, was the most vigorous, most likely to dominate production … no matter how many of the older forms survived in outward appearance.
Clearly in India’s 20th-century cultural arena, the mode of production at issue in cinema is capitalism, remembering that ‘no single mode prevailed uniformly’ and that ‘older forms survived’ at the same time. Even if those older forms survived only ‘in appearance’, that still means they must be taken into account since it is fatal to overlook appearances, especially in cinema. The lesson to be learned from D.D. Kosambi in this respect is that we must refuse to reduce a mode of production to either pure capitalism or to some older mode. In each case (film, studio, state) the particular mix of old and new will leave a particular imprint, with the capitalist mode of production in cinema providing a more (or less) dominant determination. When the cinema apparatus came into India, it was a technology and a mode of cultural manufacture and distribution without direct historical precedent in the country. On the other hand, from the earliest features of Phalke’s work and ever since then, film presented its most critical value as being a neo-traditional cultural form par excellence, a gadget that worked at its best in suturing cultural difference and producing an easily consumable homogeneity for an increasingly undifferentiated mass audience. To aid this suturing, several film-makers, producers and institutions went some way in demonstrating the survival of older forms. Phalke himself attempted a theory of film that made it virtually a traditional Indian art in the context of Swadeshi. The studio-era film-makers commonly aspired to the respectability of the reform novel, just as 50s films were later to seek the ‘high-art’ credentials of a Satyajit Ray and other directors promoted as models by the Indian State. New Indian Cinema was born in the context of Indira Gandhi’s developmentalist programmes culminating in the Emergency and the establishment of Doordarshan. Most influential of all, perhaps, was the way the Utopian ‘India’ of the pre-Independence period - the tabula rasa upon which were inscribed some of the most elaborate melodramas in Indian film history - gave way to the idea of regionalism, an idea of ethnic rootedness that effectively divided the nation into its constituent linguistic units.
All these areas inevitably came to be inscribed into the records of Indian cinema’s history, as film-makers, using the technology uniquely equipped to celebrate, intervene in and record the rise of such epochal achievements as the emergence of an Indian working class and the birth of an independent nation, assimilated local political imperatives and the languages of the ‘official’ and the neo-traditional. From its earliest years, Indian film found its archive in the popular press and the publicity outlets of the industry. The problem of facts took an ideological turn when Indian cinema institutionalised itself, and, in the process, also institutionalised its several factions, their claims and their conflicts. Institutions representing the film industry and those managing the relations between state and industry, such as the various State Film Chambers of Commerce, the Film Federation of India, the various Film Development Corporations and the trade unions led by the Indian Motion Pictures Producers Association, have, over the years, expanded their ambit to include the authority to represent the ‘official’ history of whatever sector, region or special interest they represent politically. These histories, usually published on occasions commemorating the anniversaries of various cinema industries in India, accompanied by the felicitations of their pioneers and the valorisation of independent archivists and the private collections of individual cinephiles, are entirely susceptible to the critique Gyanendra Pandey (1991) mounts against contemporary historians’ acceptance of the view that
the ‘centre’ remains the recognised vantage point for a meaningful reconstruction of “Indian” history, and the ‘official’ archive … the primary source for its construction. By attributing a ‘natural’ quality to a particular unity, such as ‘India’, and adopting its ‘official’ archive as the primary source of historical knowledge … the history of India since the early 19th century has tended to become the biography of the emerging nation-state. It has also become the history in which the story of Partition, and the accompanying Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Sikh riots … is written up as a secondary story … one that, for all its consequences, miraculously left the course of Indian history unaltered, [as] ‘India’ … started firmly and ‘naturally’ on its secular, democratic, non-violent course.
Nevertheless, if today we accept that, far from being a straightforward move towards nationalism, secularism and democracy, India’s history represents an extraordinarily chequered growth with its own share of conflicts and compromises, at least one reason for it would be the evidence provided by Indian cinema. When we started this encyclopaedic project, the aim was to provide a reference work on Indian film. In the process of its compilation, however, it developed a variety of more complex and less easily defined ambitions, a crucial one was to chronicle a sense of India that could move beyond its most obviously available nationalist construct, even as we chronicle the formation of that construct and its history through its cinematic product. Indian films are and always were read, and implicated in social transformations, in ways infinitely more complex than plot summaries or ‘official’ histories can claim or suggest. Attempts to ‘locate’ individual films or film-makers required constant cross-referencing between technological, economic, political and cultural chronologies, trying to read any one of these ‘series’ in terms of their intersections with all the others. The task was made all the harder by the simple, frustrating ‘fact’ that only a handful of India’s silent films appear to have survived and that many of the key sound films are not readily available for consultation. This has meant that we have had to rely on contemporary (whenever possible) or subsequent accounts, surviving publicity materials and so on, all of them deeply enmeshed in the rhetorical amalgam of discourses mentioned earlier. Consequently, when approaching a film, the discourses ‘placing’ it would first have to be negotiated and ‘placed’ in their turn. Of course, that way madness lies as the critic-historian is relentlessly driven further and further away from the ‘object’, the ‘source’, the film. But it is a madness that must be faced, even risked, within limits which we have endeavoured not to overstep. For instance, many of the films have come to us via plot synopses which cry out (or was it the films that cried out?) for a psychoanalytic reading. Except in a few obvious instances, this is a temptation we have resisted. Similarly, we often had to contend with flagrantly partisan synopses presenting political and, most frequently, gender oppression as the ‘natural’ order of things. These we have tried to read against the grain in the hope that the partisan version, familiar to and internalised by most film publicists and their readers, will, when juxtaposed to our less familiar perspective, spark autonomous critical thought in our readers.
On the other hand, although it may seem that the actual film might get lost in this process, the amalgam of discourses surrounding a film, usually qualified as ‘secondary’, are not totally separate from the film either. They form part of the intertextual network that gave rise to and accompanied the film in its attempt to reshape parts of the very public sphere which engendered the film in the first place. It is true that nothing can substitute for a viewing of the ‘original’ film and that the scarcity of prints preserved in a decent condition (not to mention prints uncontaminated by censors or other vandals) is a severe drawback when attempting to describe and ‘place’ it. However, it is equally true that any encounter with a film is always already pre-structured, given that people are never utterly empty-headed when watching it. Reliance on the film alone is as misguided as an overestimation of the secondary discourses. As always, we have to see the one in terms of the other.
Most of the facts in this book are gleaned from available sources, representing the most reliable ones we could find for each of India’s cinemas (the sources are listed below). Many of these are what we earlier called, somewhat dismissively, ‘official’. Given the nature of the Indian film industry, however, there were compelling reasons for drawing on this material alongside other, not always less ‘reliable’ sources. The editors of this book, quite deliberately and as a matter of policy, have refused to accept any single ‘authoritative’ source on any of India’s cinemas. On the contrary, we have endeavoured to produce a book providing the ‘most likely’ truth on the basis of often deeply conflicting sources. In this respect, what we offer here is not an authoritative source either (although these things are relative: we believe ours to be more authoritative than others simply because we were able to stand on the shoulders, so to speak, of the scholars who went before, even though none ever ventured to encompass as wide a field as we do in this project). Although this book will inevitably bear the scars inflicted by the unreliability of the sources used, we should like to believe that in consistently mapping India’s film histories on to a national canvas, we also present several new discoveries, such as the sheer contiguity of historical processes nationwide that most Indian regions persist in viewing as unique, the influences of film-makers from one region onto another, or even the trajectories of individual careers that transgressed boundaries sometimes decades before these boundaries came to be asserted.
This book shares all the problems, and some of the credit, of any endeavour that is the ‘first of its kind’. There are encouraging signs in India that several agencies, such as the National Film Archive of India, are gradually introducing sophisticated records, not only of their actual holdings but also of Indian cinema in general. Amrit Gangar and Subhash Chheda’s recently completed computerised cross-indexing of the entire output of the Films Division means that the bulk of India’s documentary cinema is now available for various kinds of research. India’s Central Board of Film Certification may well take on board the need to compile their vast data in readily accessible form, a source that has not been available for this book except for the work of B.V. Dharap. Future editions of this Encyclopaedia will no doubt benefit substantially when that work becomes available.
To sum up: this book is very much designed as a research tool, a kind of baseline for others to amplify and correct, so that it may grow into a work of collective, constantly retuned scholarship.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Bombay, April 1994