By contrast with Latin America, India could support its industry without coproductions. to firm government controls on imports, the local product ruled the market; Hollywood had little foothold. Nevertheless, production remained the chaotic, risky business it had been since World War II. As many as 800 films per year vied for screens. Distributors, exhibitors, and stars controlled the trade, and filmmaking continued to serve as a way to launder black-market money. The international market for Indian films expanded during the 1970s, drawing audiences in Russia, the Persian Gulf, and Indonesia. Within the country, film stars became parliamentary representatives and even heads of states. Cinema was India’s ninth-largest industry and its principal form of popular culture.
The continued output of the industry took place against the backdrop of almost continual civil unrest. In the 1970s, India conducted a border war with Pakistan. Two decades of riots, assassinations, bombings, and terrorist attacks followed. In Punjab, Assam, Sikkim, and other regions, the government clashed with various ethnic and political factions. Many of the most energetic Indian films of the period bear the traces of a country in precarious political health.
Hindi was the official national language, a state of affairs that strengthened Bombay’s “all-India” film. At the same time, though, regional cinemas expanded. By 1980, the states of Tamil Nadu, Anam Pradesh, and Kerala were each making over a hundred films per year. Madras, the southern production center, became the most prolific filmmaking capital in the world. In addition, because of India’s many languages, territorial distribution was the norm, with producers financing films through presale to regional distributors.
During the 1970s, new trends emerged in the popular film. Influenced by U. S. and European Westerns and kung-fu films from East Asia, Hindi directors began incorporating more violence and eroticism into their plots. The 1950s ideal of the romantic hero and heroine, played
26.6 Sholay: Bachchan (left) and his heroic partner hold off bandits terrorizing a small town.
By Raj Kapoor, Nargis, and other pure stars, was contested by rougher-hewn and more action-oriented protagonists. Tall and rugged, the young Amitabh Bachchan was the emblem of this new hero, and Sholay (“Flames of the Sun,” 1975, Ramesh Sippy) became the central film of the era. Bachchan plays one of a pair of adventurers who are hired to wreak vengeance on the leader of an outlaw band. Sholay cut down the number of song sequences (only five in its three-hour running time), replacing them with gunfights, chases, and suspenseful action (26.6). Sholay blended the tradition of dacoit (outlaw films) with the spaghetti Western to create what came to be called a “curry-Western.” Running for five years in Bombay alone, Sholay steered the industry toward more extreme drama, as in the cycle of rape-and-revenge films, often with female protagonists, that emerged in the 1980s.
The cutthroat competition of the commercial industry, with its masala pictures mixing romance, action, melodrama, and musical numbers, left little room for alternative filmmaking. In the late 1960s, the government created a “Parallel Cinema” by encouraging the Film Finance Corporation to shift its support from commercial fare toward low-budget, art-cinema efforts. When Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969; p. 537) proved successful with audiences, other directors’ projects were given loans. The Bombay-based Parallel Cinema overshadowed the Bengali cinema, long associated with the prestigious productions of Satyajit Ray. In addition, some state governments aided low-budget filmmakers; for example, Kerala’s Communist government encouraged political films. A sense of “quality” film culture also emerged from new film festivals and screenings at the National Film Archive at Pune.
Although many Parallel Cinema films were made in Hindi, they offered none of the spectacle and flamboyant music of the mainstream cinema. Most represented quiet social commentary, influenced by Ray’s humanistic realism, Italian Neorealism, and European new cinemas. Basu Chatterji’s The Whole Sky (1969), for example, recalls the wry poignancy of Czech cinema.
Other Parallel Cinema directors used their films for political critique. In Sen’s The Interview (1971), a hero looking for a job is played by an unemployed worker; Calcutta ’71 (1972) samples five cases of poverty drawn from forty years of the city’s history; and Chorus (1974) attacks multinational corporations. Sen experimented with stylized performance, Brechtian reflexivity, direct address to the audience, and other tactics of political modernism. Similarly self-conscious was Ritwik Ghatak’s final film, Reason, Argument, and Tale (1974). In this rambling, disjunctive work, the aging pioneer of political cinema plays an alcoholic intellectual killed by young revolutionaries. Shyam Benegal contributed to the political orientation of the Parallel Cinema with The Seedling (1974), a social drama of a young landlord who exploits a servant and his wife, and The Churning (1976), a tale of a rural milk cooperative; the latter film was financed by 50,000 members of such cooperatives.
Not all Parallel Cinema films stressed political comment. Although both Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul studied with Ghatak at the Pune Film Institute, neither embraced radical critique. Shahani studied at IDHEC in Paris as well, and he served as assistant director for Robert Bresson on Une Femme douce (1969). In India, Shahani made The Mirror of Illusion (1972), about an aristocratic woman who dreams of escape from her father’s crumbling mansion in the countryside (26.7). The Mirror of Illusion uses subtle color progressions and solemn long takes; Bresson called it the most slowly paced film he had ever seen. The film won praise abroad but had no screenings in India.
Mani Kaul, an admirer of Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Yasujiro Ozu, also created a sparse, demanding film in A Day’s Bread (1970). A study of a few hours in the life of a village woman oppressed by a callous husband, the film’s minimal gestures, uninflected performance, and long-held “empty” shots convey her endless waiting for her husband’s bus. Although Kaul’s work recalls European films, he strove for the cinematic equivalent of Indian classical music, in which time feels suspended.
Openly refusing the formulas of popular cinema, the new films depended on government financing, and problems arose fairly soon. Censors clamped down on many directors; M. S. Sathyu’s Hot Winds (1975), which revived the memories of the wrenching division
26.7 The Mirror of Illusion: in the deserted villa, Taran lives with her father and yearns for a life outside (production still).
Of India from Pakistan, was suppressed for a year. Moreover, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) had failed to create an alternative distribution and exhibition network. With no art theaters in the country, there were no venues for experimental or political films, and most failed to pay off their government loans. In 1975, a government inquiry into the FFC decided that many of the Parallel Cinema films were self-ind ulgent exercises and should not have been funded. The commission also suggested that in future all sponsored films would have to have commercial potential.
In 1975 as well, Indian politics was rocked by the announcement that the election of Indira Gandhi had been found invalid because of campaign irregularities. She immediately declared a nationwide state of emergency and ordered mass arrests of her critics, including nearly all the leaders of opposition parties. The emergency lasted until 1977, when Gandhi was voted out of power by the nonCommunist opposition; but a 1980 election returned her to power. (In 1984, she was assassinated by two bodyguards, which led to widespread rioting.)
Under the emergency, the Parallel Cinema’s difficulties with censorship and finance intensified. Political dissent was discouraged, and controversial films sent to the censors sometimes simply vanished. A business leader was put in charge of the FFC to stem the growing drain on loan money. The state, reaping profits from high exhibition taxes and its monopoly on film import, favored the commercial industry. After the 1977 elections, however, a burst of politically critical cinema appeared in Bengal. The more mainstream Shyam Benegal became identified with a blend of social criticism and entertainment values. The Role (1977) studies a 1940s film actress, and The Obsession (1978), financed by its star Shashi Kapoor, was a major commercial success. Bene-gal’s cameraman, Govind Nihalani, directed Cry of the Wounded (1980), a denunciation of the government’s oppression of a tribe denied any caste.
In 1980, the government tried again to develop a quality cinema apart from commercial fare. The FFC was reborn as the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). It sponsored screenwriting competitions, promoted Indian films abroad, and helped fund films through loans and cofinancing agreements. During its first decade, the NFDC supported almost 200 films. The NFDC was able to pay for such risks by its monopoly powers: only it could import foreign films, bring in raw film and equipment, and distribute foreign films on video. Costs were also defrayed by the NFDC’s participation in international coproductions, most notably Gandhi (1984).
A new generation of directors, most trained at the national film academy in Pune, emerged under the auspices of government patronage. Some pushed further in the intimist tradition of Ray. Aparna Sen, India’s best-known woman director, was compared to Ray for her English-language feature 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Asha Dutta, the only woman to concentrate on camerawork at the Pune Film Institute, made My Story (1984),
26.8 Brother and sister visit their captured rat, unaware that the man’s refusal to adapt will eventually trap him as well [Rat Trap).
26.9 Kasba: meticulous and unsensational realism for the tale of a rich man’s mad son and an innocent local woman.
A seriocomic tale of spoiled youth. In Kerala, Pune graduates founded a film cooperative to help back independent features. An example was Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Rat Trap (1981), which uses symbolic devices reminiscent of the art cinema to show a man’s obliviousness to social change (26.8).
More experimental was the work of Ketan Mehta, who drew stylized techniques from popular theater and early Bombay talkies. A Folk Tale (1980) employs a narrator familiar from folk drama and offers the audience alternative endings. Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1986) synthesizes popular musical genres, and Hero Hiralal
(1988) satirizes the film industry.
Older directors found new energy under the NFDC policy. Ray, Sen, and Benegal won NFDC financing throughout the 1980s. Shahani, who had not made a film for twelve years, reentered production with Tarang
(1984), a three-hour study of the industrial bourgeoisie, and went on to Kasba (1990), a Chekhovian dissection of a struggling family in the countryside (26.9). Significantly, Kasba relied on stars—one of many signs that the art cinema had to make itself more mainstream.
As television grew during the 1980s, the central government, which had a monopoly on the new medium, asked important directors to make telefilms. The network also broadcast award-winning films. At the same time, the expansion of videocassettes and cable lured away the middle-class audience and made the film industry even more volatile and precarious. Bombay films vied for popularity with southern products. Blockbusters and top stars began failing; in 1989, 95 percent of theatrical films failed to earn back their costs. Directors began preparing features for direct release to cassette shops and video parlors.
Astonishingly, theatrical film production did not abate, remaining at 800 or more features throughout the 1990s. Perhaps even more surprising was the rise of the non-Hindi film. From 1990 on, most films were in regional languages, primarily those of the southern states.
Many were simultaneously made to be released in different language communities.
Coproductions, “InternationalDirectors,” and a New Political Cinema
As in Europe, coproductions promised new markets. Festival-based directors were working with firms in the Netherlands, the USSR, France, and the United States; Britain’s Channel 4, for instance, participated in the financing of Kasba and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!
(1988). The Harvard-educated Nair gained international acclaim for this film and her next, Mississippi Masala (1991), which focused on an Indian woman who falls in love with an African American man. Nair followed this with the controversial Kama Sutra—A Tale of Love (1997) and the festival favorite Monsoon Wedding (2001), which pays tribute to the musical traditions of Indian film.
One of the most controversial films of the 1990s was another coproduction with Channel 4. Shekar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994) lashes out at the caste system, the mistreatment of women, and police brutality. Based on the true story of Phoolan Devi, a lower-caste woman who was sold as a child bride and then gang-raped by upper-caste men and policemen, the film tells how she joined an outlaw gang and took revenge on her rapists—an echo of the female-avenger genre of the 1980s (26.10). Devi’s election to Parliament in 1996 was widely attributed to the film’s notoriety. Like Nair, Kapur became a transnational filmmaker, directing the British release Elizabeth (1998).
Kapur was criticized for sensationalizing Bandit Queen in formulaic ways, but he insisted that only through popular forms could one achieve a socially
26.10 The Bandit Queen: Phoolan Devi protects her wounded lover.
26.11 Bombay’s vision of a united India: as the parents are reunited with their children, hands drop weapons and stretch out in friendship.
Critical cinema. “In India, there is no salvation outside the commercial cinema.”* Also pursuing this path was Mani Rathnam, a Tamil filmmaker who found great success with Nayakan (“Hero,” 1986), an adaptation of The Godfather. Rathnam’s Bombay (1994) denounces the bloody religious strife of the early 1990s. A Hindu journalist marries a Muslim woman, and the couple and their children are thrust into the middle of anti-Muslim rioting. Bombay neighborhoods are spectacularly re-created in a Madras studio, riot scenes are shot and edited for visceral force, hand-held cameras race through the streets, and children watch as people trapped in cars are burned alive. Banned in some Indian states, Bombay proved successful in most regions, thanks not only to its topicality but also to its star performances, engaging music, and redemptive ending, in which hands drop their weapons and stretch out in friendship (26.11).
Apart from the works of Nair and Kapur, few Indian films were seen on the festival circuit. One that was, however, offered thoughtful testimony about the years of political violence. Santosh Sivan’s Tamil-language film The Terrorist (1998) focuses on a woman who has joined an assassination plot (evidently modeled on the 1991 killing of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi). As the conspiracy moves forward, she discovers the importance of human life. Sivan was under no illusions that the film would attract a mass audience. “We didn’t want to make it like one masala package.”2
Hollywood had long targeted India, where theaters attracted up to 7 billion viewers per year. In 1992, the government ended the NFDC’s monopoly on film import, and, for the first time, recent American movies poured in. The success of Jurassic Park in 1994 and Titanic in 1998 convinced Hollywood that the market would respond to the right blockbusters.
Yet local audiences remained loyal to the national product—which was now incorporating more sexuality along with MTV dance styles (e. g., Trimurti, 1995). Jurassic Park was unable to trump another 1994 release, the traditional romantic comedy-drama Hum Aapke Hain Koun. . . ! (“Who Am I to You?”). Filled with sparkling studio-shot dance numbers (Color Plate 26.5), it became the most popular film of the decade. Even after restrictions were lifted, American imports claimed no more than 10 percent of the box office. In a country where nearly half the population earned only a dollar a day, admission to a local film ran only about fifty cents while Hollywood films were priced between two and three dollars per ticket. And, despite rounds of violence as gangsters intimidated producers, there were other signs of health. Indian films were starting to sell in Europe, Japan, and North America, while an up-to-date, 2000-acre production complex was attracting foreign filmmakers.
World History
