Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065

Theory of Indian Cinema

Akaitab Mukherjee Ph.D. Scholar Humanities and Social Sciences Indian School of Mines Dhanbad

Abstract

Theodore Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory defines art as: “The concept of art is located in a historically challenging constellation of elements; it refuses definition”. Raymond Williams, the eminent cultural historian, cites “art” as one of the “keywords” – one that must be understood in order to comprehend the inter-relationships between culture and society. Cinema has already proved itself an art. However, as montage was developed in Russia in particular socio-political scenario and Italian neo-realism developed during the anarchic social condition, similarly Indian cinema has been developed in particular socio-political context. Though Indian cinema is identified with the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalkrishnan etc. but in India they are categorised as art film and almost marginalised. Popular cinema, which is marked with melodrama, musical extravaganza and fancy dominates. It succeeded because it entertains a middle-class audience, which is the most powerful class of the country. There is another variation too, which is known as middle-cinema, which is the predecessor of post-independence cinema. This paper will try to theorise these three variations of films.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Indian cinema, art cinema, popular cinema, culture.

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In Indian cinema the theoretical silence around the specificity of the commercial cinema is due to the discourses and institutions of art cinema in the 1950s, which refused to consider the commercial film as a focus of serious discussion (Vasudevan 227). Earlier, Pune in Maharashtra and Calcutta in Bengal were important centres of film production, catering to the Marathi and Bengali speaking regional audience as well as to the Hindi audience which is the largest linguistic market of the country. In 1950s Bombay became ascendant in the home market. While these regional markets continued to exist, Bombay became the main focus of national film production. This ascendancy was curtailed by the emergence of the important industries in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, producing films in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. From the 1980s, these centres produced as many and often more films than Bombay (Vasudevan 228).

A cinema, which emerged in the late 1890s, involved in the internal contradictions of a modernized language of empire. The framework of national cinema has become a vital aspect in Film Studies because of the nation’s function as a central axis along which films are produced, regulated, consumed and canonized. Insights about nation’s ideological production and reconstruction through cinema hold profound relevance of analysis, because the nation as an organizing device in order to resist the temptation of making it, in Foucault’s words a “tranquil locus on the basis of which other questions (concerning structure, coherence, systematically, transformations) may be posed” (26). In India also the growth and development of national cinema implicitly hint nation’s ideological production. In the early twentieth century at the territorial apogee of empire, decolonizing movements demanded for a universalization of political modernity or bourgeois democracy and it challenged the legitimacy of colonialism. India’s partitioned formation threw into question its own viability as a prospective nation, even it unveiled the fragility of the British nation state that was constituted on internally schismatic-simultaneously liberal and imperial political philosophies. The notion of modern nation-state was under construction in India and systematically fabricated in Britain. Indian and British films were very much affected by this turbulence. In this political landscape, Indian film makers rebuffed imperial state initiatives while fashioning a regional hegemonic film industry and wresting a domestic audience from Hollywood’s control. The regulatory debates on film aesthetics of this period shot through with contradictions between the languages of imperialism and anti-colonialism, making them linked expressions of transformation (Jaikumar 3-4). Three linked factors have a formative influence on

http://www.ijellh.com 13 Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 Indian film aesthetics in the late colonial era: firstly, their allusive commentary on the nationalist project and on the British imperialism through visualizations of a new civil society; secondly, their origins in the pre-cinematic as well as modern Indian art forms; finally, their function in giving Indian films a competitive edge over Hollywood and other film imports by borrowing and localizing their attractions.

In post-independence era, especially after the Nehruvian era when the commercialization of the Bombay film industry was increased, the distance between commercial and art film became wide. Ashis Nandy in his essay “An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema” states that there are three categories of films: commercial film, middle-brow cinema and art films. The common characteristic of these three categories is that they depend on the middle-classes for legitimacy and critical acclaim. It is obvious that there are differences in the cultural thrusts of these three types of films. To gauge the appeal or lack of appeal of these groups, the thrusts should be identified. Commercial cinema tends to reflect and be protective towards the cultural values of the society. Its criticism towards any tradition is usually indirect, latent or unintended. Commercial cinema tends to reaffirm the values that are being increasingly marginalised in public life by the language of the modernizing middle-classes such as consensual non-contractual human relations, community ties, the primacy of maternity over conjugality, relevance of the mythic over the historical. But such inexplicit criticism of middle-class values is cast not in the language of social criticism (Nandy 202). Commercial cinema takes an instrumental view of cultural traditions and world views and presents them theatrically and spectacularly. It generalizes specific problems of different audience and exteriorizes the psychological components of these problems. Ashis Nandy comments about this strategy of Hindi cinema: “to this extent such [Hindi] cinema is anti- psychological: it presents psychological conflicts as if they were conflicts among social types or products of a unique conjunction of external events” (Nandy 204). Therefore stereotypes such as the grandiloquent stylisation of the Muslim aristocratic traditions of north India, Rajput valour, Bengali romanticism, Goan Christian simplicity are available in Hindi cinema. Together they allow commercial cinema to “spectacularize” and de-psychologize everything it touches and subject every value and sentiment to the judgement of the market (Nandy 205). It is a cinema that appears terribly flawed by the canons of global film theory and almost entirely disjunctive with the globally dominant aesthetics and concepts of good cinema. Its principal attractions which are the carnivalesque atmosphere, the larger-than-life characters, the centrifugal story line and stilted

http://www.ijellh.com 14 Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 dialogue – also mark it out as flawed art and a curious intrusion into the world of modern art forms. There are other typical characteristics of Indian cinema such as meaningless digressions from the core narrative, embarrassingly juvenile conception of the comic as well as the romantic, maudlin melodrama, a historic plot and inconsistent sequencing makes it stand completely in the opposite poles from that where Frederico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray or Jean-Luc Godard stand (Lal and Nandy xiv). This commercial cinema has tended to play an anti-theoretical role, occasionally offering an explicit critique of the application of Enlightenment assumptions in the Indian context (Lal and Nandy 14). Ashis Nandy observes: “...It is possible that public lamentation about the alleged aesthetic and moral failure of the commercial film only reinforces its appeal for its audience, which is unconcerned about the aesthetic and the ethics, the absurdity and “immorality”, because it has the secret code by which to decipher the film’s latent social message in the context of its life world. It is actually willing to read such lamentations as final and satisfactory proof of the commercial film’s defiance of culturally alien aspects of middle-class morality” (Nandy 205).Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy in their introduction of Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and Iconic in Indian Cinema writes: “Popular culture, especially popular cinema, now began to look like a crucial battle ground where the battles between the old and the new, the traditional and modern, the global and the local were being fought through the renegotiation of myth and fantasy life” (xxiv). In his essay entitled “Popular Cinema, India and Fantasy” by Probal Dasgupta categorises cinema a second master narrative in ordinary life today, which seconds novel, since it governs the conventions of the ordinary self-construction of individuals in our times, regardless of how one characterizes these times and the individual. A scrutiny of this anti-naturalistic forces us beyond the limits of ordinary thinking about the cinema, taking us into the regions normally occupied by Indian philosophy (Lal and Nandy 3).

An element of showmanship and ornamental stylization has always been crucial to the theory and practice of image-making in India and this tendency is discernible in commercial cinema also. According to Mukund Lath the constitutive role of songs in popular Hindi cinema and the juxtaposition of such numbers with mimetic episodes are among the many points at which modern practice corresponds to the traditional aesthetic codified in Bharata’s Natyashastra. Lath asserts that stylization and heterogeneity of discourse have been consistent features of narrative representation in India. These features are non-linear and frequently depart from the mimetic- naturalistic modes of representing action. Lath reinforces the view that non-linear conventions of

http://www.ijellh.com 15 Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 representation embody an epistemology in which the spectacle is produced and constructed as an illusion (Lal and Nandy 10). Like Lath A. L. Basham in his A Cultural History of India perceived the continuity between the classical plays and contemporary films. Byrski in his essay “Bombay Philum – the Kaliyugi Avatara of Sanskrit Drama” displays such flows are worked out in specific contexts by comparing Kalidas’s Abhigyan Shakuntalam and Raj Kapoor’s Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram. Such progression may or may not exemplify the deployment of traditional race theory in a modern cinematic context. They must while bringing in elements of modernity in Indian concepts of good and evil, simultaneously rebel against such importation. Perhaps even the presence of all the nine prescribed rasas of classical poetics comes in as a technology of checks and counterchecks that contends against very excess. The ultimate remedy of a trendy “pathology” within the popular cinema is not changed in fashion, of the kind available within a mass market, but the seeds of “self-destruction” the trend or genre carries within itself (Nandy 10).

Borrowing concepts from Indian philosophy the tendency of incorporating fancy in commercial cinema can be analysed. In commercial cinema there is slippage between mimetic dialogue and stylized song. This slippage occurs in a luminal zone where the naturalistic ordering of languages and meta-languages becomes fuzzy and the attention bubble sometimes fuses with other spaces. Non-linearity enables the representative to cope with the problem of both having yourself and also transcending it. Then Dhyanabhanga, enchantment’s victory over meditative attention, may be taken as iconic of the Indian cinema’s aesthetics’ solution to the level ordering problem of languages and meta-languages (Lal and Nandy 10).

The concept of cinema can be analysed through Bhartrihar’s sphota theory which has been translated as “spark theory” by Probal Dasgupta. A spark or an individual embodiment of charged or meaningful form, is always a production of image, and that imagination is always a constructive activity. Thus, every vaikhari unpacking of the level called madhyama (treated not transcendentally but as a stage) is always a performance and thus counts as a contingent production of the substance. Given this formulation where the postulation of forms and meanings becomes a mere technical grammatical exercise and does not affect the substantiality or the contingent character of discourse, the present theory of art becomes fully congruent with the classical Indian tradition of linguistic theory (Nandy and Lal 12).

http://www.ijellh.com 16 Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 The theoretical unity and (technical distinction) of form and sense in the spark underwrites a discourse that can, in principle, switch between languages and meta-languages. The philosophical analysis of art shows the power of this principle by holding up for our attention not the routine sparks of ordinary language but the charged images of life. The charge implies such question as: Who must you, and the protagonists with whom you identify be, to perceptive and respond to this charge as a charge? The attraction of the spectacle implicitly draws attention to your position as someone who receives and consumes it as spectacular. The anti-naturalism of the aesthetics of production expresses the forces that enable you to receive and consume – call them desires – in shapes that embody the spectator’s position within the work of itself (Lal and Nandy 13).

Middle cinema, the second category, according to Ashis Nandy, is the heir of the pre- independence modern cinema and its occasional attempts to be “arty” which usually remains unsuccessful. By the term “arty” Ashis Nandy demonstrates the scattered attempts by some directors to turn cinema into a new artistic medium of cultural and personal self-expression in India (Nandy 203). However, middle cinema was stimulated by wider cultural current such as the current represented by great creative products of Ravi Verma to Premchand, Girish Chandra Bose to Prithviraj Kapoor, by Marathi stage music to K. L. Saigal. Though the middle cinema is often viewed as a compromise between commercial and art cinema, it could be more appropriately seen as a further development of the style that once catered to the middle-class culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Ashis Nandy remarks: “The middle cinema has in fact a tradition to build upon, the tradition of the “good popular cinema” of yesteryears” (Nandy 204). This type of cinema caters to that part of the middle-class consciousness which during the last century and a half played a creative role in Indian society by sustaining a dialogue at the popular plane between the traditional and modern, the east and the west, the classical and folk, though it was imperfect in its treatment (Nandy 204). Films of P. C. Barua, V. Shantaram, Debaki Bose and Bimal Roy can be examples of middle- cinema.

Art film, the last category, usually provides sharp criticisms and deep analyses of the social pathologies, associated with tradition that contrasts markedly with their shallow or superficial criticisms of the violence and exploitation associated with modern institutions. Its exploration of reality is continuous with typically modern forms of cognitive enquiry and it is bound by the rules of wakefulness. This tendency prevents it to assimilate the elements of fancy with the plot and causes it to share the predicament of most critics and theoretical work in modern India. But the

http://www.ijellh.com 17 Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 lacuna of the Indian art film is that it was never sensitive to the growing threats to lifestyles, life- support systems and non-modern cognitive orders. It never ponders on the issues related to mere survival and protection of the global commons, traditional technologies, knowledge of health care, and community self-sufficiency outside the monetized sector of the economy. Conversely, commercial cinema consciously or unconsciously exploits the feelings, attitudes and values associated with the previously mentioned issues, but in the process also unwittingly supports, even if only partially and even while mouthing the slogans of the dominant culture of politics (Nandy 199). Indian art films follow western theoretical frameworks and the parameters of aesthetics. The methods of analysis in these movies overwhelmingly bespeak paradigms shaped and reshaped by the western master discourses and their limit representation to a controlled set of options bound by the rules of enlightenment (Lal and Nandy 14). Therefore art films in India are colonized yet it leaves some gap where resistance against this colonization is possible.

Thus, these three variations have been developed in particular socio-political scenario in India. But all these three types of movies lack experiment. The popular movie depends on the box-office success, and therefore it is unable to put aside the formulas without which it cannot be sold. The art film, on the other hand, follows the masterpieces of the foreign film directors and western film theories and there is hardly any innovative approach which can make the audience decipher the problems of the country. And the number of middle cinema is remarkably less, since it is difficult to balance with the box office and artistic at the same time. The role cinema played after the independence has been vanished these days. Hope in near future talented directors will come out of the slavery of the western film canon and focus on the problems of India, which will be less obscure like the art film and not verisimilitude like commercial cinema, and assist the producers to collect the money also.

Works Cited

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Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Print.

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Lal, Vinay, and Ashis Nandy, ed. Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in

Indian Cinema. New Delhi: OUP, 2013. Print.

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Nandy, Ashis. Return from Exile: Alternative Sciences, Illegitimacy of Nationalism, The Savage Freud. New Delhi: OUP, 2013. Print.

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