Theory of Indian Cinema

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. http://www.ijellh.com 12 Volume II, Issue VII, November 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 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

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