Indian Cinema: A Very Short Introduction by Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Author:Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191034770
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

The ‘all-India film’

Independent India’s condemnation of the cinema as an industry in inexorable decline, incapable of playing any constructive role in the nation-to-be, saw almost all of Indian cinema tarnished as though with a single brush: to be held in a contempt not unlike that shown in British documentarist Alexander Shaw’s denunciation of all Indian films as nothing but ‘hundreds of feet of leering, posturing pretty-pretties’. Both the idea of national reform and the denunciation of low culture had clear colonial antecedents, and neither permitted postwar Bombay cinema to be seen for what it indeed was—a complex negotiation of the cultures and economies of Partition.

Bombay, as India’s undeclared entertainment capital, home of its biggest film industry, radiated its impact in the decade after Independence, as it set up a complex exhibition network that would reach every corner of the country. There were very few distributors who had nationwide networks. Most distributors were regionally organized, and they in turn negotiated with local exhibitors who ran the movie houses, collected their box office receipts, and paid entertainment tax. There were various contractual systems by which major films would be sold. Producers would commonly receive advances from distributors in return for privileged rights, unless they had the money to make the film on their own, which allowed them to drive harder bargains later on. Exhibitors, on the other end of the chain, would also feed the 16 millimetre circuits, which is where any film would typically end its life.

One of the first to attribute a political agenda to such a complex mode of dissemination was the film historian Chidananda Das Gupta, who named this entire enterprise the ‘all-India film’. The Hindi omnibus song-dance spectacular was, he said, a form that appropriated aspects both from indigenous popular film and theatre genres and from Hollywood. What was important was how it subordinated them to an all-encompassing entertainment formula designed to overcome regional and linguistic boundaries. Das Gupta now ascribed to this formula a default function: of providing a ‘cultural leadership [that reinforces] some of the unifying tendencies in our social and economic changes’. In doing so, it also found itself providing ‘an inferior alternative [to a leadership that] has not emerged because of the hiatus between the intelligentsia, to which the leaders belong, and the masses’.

Such a claim for a national cinema came, in contrast to almost anywhere else on earth, from bottom-up: it arose illegitimately, as a claim that emerged from the market and almost beneath the radar of state supervision. As had happened with the swadeshi movement, so now, it was as though the cinema found itself being force-fitted into a political role. While in the early 1950s, such a conception of an ‘all-India film’ could only exist in the films made in Bombay and to a lesser extent in Madras, within the decade, emerging film industries across India would lay their own claims to making their own versions of a national film.

Through the 1950s a growing number of films showed, in one

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