Unruly Cinema

History, Politics, and Bollywood

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252052002
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond.

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

CHAPTER 1

Colonial Indian Cinema

A Peripheral Modernity

Cinema went through two major transformations in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The first was the emergence of America as a global presence in the film industry, replacing France as the foremost producer and distributor of films worldwide.1 This emergence was driven by American studios’ sustained campaign to capitalize on cinema’s universal appeal. The global success of the campaign was bolstered by the First World War, which had depleted Europe’s manufacturing power. As the United States became the foremost exporter of manufactured goods during the war, the cargo of American films found easy passage to Europe and beyond. As early as 1916, New York replaced London as the global hub for film export, and by 1921 American films captured a majority share of the market in every country except Germany. The second transformation, however, proved a decisive check on Hollywood’s overwhelming dominance and led to the diverse growth of other national cinemas. This transformation came around 1930, when sound film production exceeded that of silent film worldwide.2 The arrival of sound coincided with a critical moment in American and global capitalism. With American manufactures and exports affected by the Great Depression, Hollywood was forced to face the linguistic diversity of its global viewership. Between 1929 and 1934, various national quotas on film imports, coupled with the cost of film dubbing, led to a steep downslide in Hollywood’s foreign market. Though the slide ended in 1934 and recovery began in 1935, that half-decade weakening was enough to allow major film-producing nations in Europe to start battling for control of their domestic markets. While the far reach and prominence of Hollywood remained part of the global human experience, the 1930s proved that the world wanted more from cinema than Hollywood had to offer. Other industries of the world were ready to step in.

Outside Europe, only India and Japan were able to overcome Hollywood’s hold on their film markets.3 Both countries had developed their affinity for movies through used “junk” films routed through Europe. India was an outlier yet, as a colonized territory subject to British imperial control over imports, licensing, and exhibition—that is, every aspect of production and consumption of cinema. As Hollywood’s exports took a brief tumble, Japanese and Indian cinemas mapped out their own distinct courses.4 In the Indian scenario, the agent of transformation was what Kristin Thompson has called “a unique native version of the musical genre,” a composite form of cinema that has since become the mainstay of Indian popular film across regions, genres, and languages.5 While the vast majority of silent films exhibited in British India in the 1920s were imports from Hollywood, the Indian talkie with songs soon wrested the market away, so much so that in 1937, Hollywood’s share of the market had dropped to 46 percent (from 90 percent in 1922 and 80 percent in 1929), with Indian films now at 38 percent and British films at 12.6 By 1939, the output of Indian films had grown enough to claim over half of the market, with Hollywood as the only significant foreign import at 45 percent.7 By 1947, at its birth as a sovereign nation-state, India was the third highest film-producing nation in the world, with films in ten languages serving 80 percent of the domestic market. Although the Cold War–era global dynamic of various national cinemas mostly worked out in Hollywood’s favor, in India Hollywood remained a minority cinema, with exhibition limited to select theaters in the metropolises.8

The world’s largest national industry since 1971, Indian cinema is a multilingual, multilocal entity, wrongly treated in popular imagination as an extension of Bollywood. The cinema of “Bollywood” (a sobriquet for the Hindi-language film industry based in Bombay or Mumbai) constitutes less than 15 percent of Indian cinema’s total output in the twenty-first century. It is also, however, the only domestic film industry with nationwide distribution in India, and it is currently the best-known global cultural product out of India. To make sense of these facts and the industry they describe, we need to return to the beginnings of Indian cinema. Why? The answer lies in the single formal element that connects the first sound films produced in Bombay and Calcutta in the 1930s to twenty-first-century Bollywood: the use of non-diegetic songs, played at a uniform tone and volume, generally interrupting the flow of the narrative, and, at least after the first few years, almost never catching the habitual Indian viewer by surprise. In a way, what makes Bollywood unique was already germinating in the first Indian talkie, Alam Ara, directed by Ardeshir Irani. Released in March 1931, the Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani film Alam Ara was followed by eleven other films within the same calendar year—all had non-diegetic music, songs sung by actors interspersed throughout the body of visual narrative. Playback music—music recorded separately and inserted in the film during editing—was introduced in 1935, introducing song recordings as an important subdomain of the film market. Film songs remained the majority product of the Indian recording industry for the next seven decades.9

Accepting non-diegetic songs as an integral part of the Indian cinematic tradition, we must also be wary of essentialist reduction. While influences from pre-cinematic theatrical traditions—both the urban proscenium and open-air folk categories—flowed into cinemas throughout South Asia, there was nothing inevitable about the de rigueur Indian adaptation of non-diegetic songs. Notwithstanding its roots in other live performative arts, songs in India’s early sound cinema were novelties that refused to conform to cinematic rules, producing a discrete art form encased in another art form. Such encasing was present from the beginning, when, between 1931 and 1935, music and dialogue had to be recorded simultaneously with the filming. This could be accomplished only by “tight frame composition” of “one-shot” songs that required suspension of all action. The line between actor and singer was fluid, as was the line between the cinematic narrative and the song sequence. Shankarrao Damle, chief sound engineer for Prabhat Film Company in Pune, describes one such sequence from a film he had watched in his youth:

A couple of horsemen are seen riding furiously through a forest—it was a hunting expedition. One of the horsemen is the king. … Suddenly his horse comes to a halt underneath a big tree and we see the king dismounting. … In the next shot we see the king taking deliberate and determined steps towards the camera. Apparently, he has something on his mind and before one can wonder what it might be, the king has stopped and burst into a song. The song goes on for about three minutes. … Neither the camera nor the king has moved. After the song is over, the king goes back to this horse and resumes the hunt.10

Though Damle does not name the film, we can assume it was made in the early 1930s, before playback music was introduced.11 For a relevant parallel in the era of playback music, let us turn to a fictional but entirely plausible film scene described in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children:

Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar, who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss—and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind a bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously—so low we have sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the foundations of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword … as they mouthed to playback music.12

In both Damle’s recollection and Rushdie’s imagination, the non-diegetic song is an aberration and a cultural curiosity: absurd to the outsider and a staple to the accustomed viewer. The formal strangeness that the song added to cinematic diegesis from the early years was enhanced further after 1935, when the actors increasingly broke into song in the voice of playback singers, the playback singer’s voice easily distinguishable from that of the actor.13 But others have offered more nuanced views. In 1967, the Indian auteur Satyajit Ray referred to his coming across an American film magazine that interpreted the Indian film song as a device similar to “Brechtian alienation” in theater, and Ray himself maintained that the song, even in its non-diegetic form, could be understood as a “cinematic device” only if it had some resonance with other devices or styles used in the same film.14 In the same essay, Ray draws out a more material justification: in the absence of the “music halls, revues, plays, concerts” that the middle class in advanced stages of capitalism had, cinema in India was the only affordable entertainment for the masses, thus offering the perfect platform for songs that had no ontological reason to be in films. Caryl Flinn, in her essay on screen musicals on a global scale, finds such a materialist function of songs quite plausible for Indian audiences who “traditionally return to musicals for the purpose of re-experiencing the songs, with the movies functioning as a sort of visualized iTunes or radio.”15

Writing forty years apart, Ray and Flinn both locate the place of songs in Indian film in the material conditions of cinematic production, a position strongly advocated in this book. The “song in film” thus offers the perfect segue to this chapter’s contextual history of early Indian cinema, which will trace the arc of the medium from the first Indian screenings of silent films in 1896 to the moment of Indian talkies’ prevailing over Hollywood in the 1930s. In contrast to France, Germany, and Japan—countries with significant national cinema bodies that fostered monolingual film industries through nation-statist policies in opposition to Hollywood and that were aided by capitalist advancement—India gained control of its domestic film market while still a colony at the bottom end of capitalist development. India’s unparalleled linguistic and cultural diversity only heightens the contrast. What makes the history of Indian cinema unique is that its many commercial cinemas sprouted and evolved despite so many forces and opinions aligned against it throughout the twentieth century, from the disapproval of the British imperial state to the resistance of the anticolonial nationalists, and then from the apathy of the regulatory nation-state to the perpetual condescension of informed film critics.

The odds were stacked against Indian cinema from the beginning. Indian filmmakers who co-opted the new filmic technology belonged to a population shorn of its manufacturing abilities by colonialism. The “age of empire”—the last phase in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the long nineteenth century—saw an unprecedented acceleration in the flow of technology on a global scale, but that flow had a directional politics that is particularly relevant to the history of cinema in India.16 The British East India Company’s trade and conquest model—as different from the discovery and conquest of the Spanish conquistadores—engendered the earliest phase of globalization. And cinema from the very beginning was embedded in the intensely mobilized flow of things and ideas bearing mechanical modernity out of metropolitan Europe into the colonies. Cinema arrived in India to cater to the largest mass of colonial captives in global capitalism. There was little scope in a regulated but messy economy for entrepreneurship or technological experimentation. But cinema’s unusual nexus of art, technology, and business, combined with its new, inchoate nature, made it a perfect medium. While the immediate popularity of cinema across the subcontinent may not be extraordinary, the circumstances of indigenous film production ended up exploding the “captive consumer model” for colonized Indians. This chapter journeys through the messy, overlapping interchange between consumption and production experienced by the first post-cinematic generation of Indians.

The Colonial Prosumers

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had established an efficient sea route from Europe to Asia. The canal, eulogized by Walt Whitman in “A Passage to India,” facilitated transport of manufactured goods as well as the latest technology from Europe to Britain’s territories in India and Burma.17 Bombay and Calcutta, the two port cities that became the first Indian centers of cinema production, were colonial creations, built by the East India Company in the seventeenth century. These cities were India’s first modern metropolises, but they were also distinct colonial fabrications of haste, profit, and progress, which made their landscapes different from that of London or Paris. Populations thrust together by the machinery of the East India Company inhabited a shared space that nevertheless had discrete niches for each group. Single-screen theaters built in the 1930s through the 1960s had comfort and film selections tailored to distinct localities, easily visible in the mid- to late twentieth-century maps of these two cities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the flow of technology from the West accelerated, the consumption of new gadgets coexisted with innovative uses of the old throughout a broad spectrum of the population. Sudhir Mahadevan’s research on consumers of photography in colonial Calcutta reveals a hybrid lot: there were “elite and poor Europeans, amateur and commercial photographers, and elite and poorer Indians.”18 This observation held true for colonial Bombay too. In the scattered, hybrid world of colonial consumption, photography was as much part of the elite milieu as it was of the commonplace market or the “bazaar” scene.

Mahadevan’s research on the circulation of photography and photographic equipment in colonial India reveals a paradox that is particularly relevant to early cinematic technology. Photography studios had existed in India from the 1840s onward; “Bourne and Shepherd” of Calcutta, one of the oldest existing studios, began selling and renting photographic equipment in 1868.19 As early as 1854, the East India Company had officialized the use of photographs in its archeological and topographical surveys.20 Even a handful of photographic images from the 1857 Indian soldiers’ rebellion against the East India Company have survived, making it the first photographed Indian war. In the 1870s, a “colonial market” emerged for ready-made and mass-manufactured media, fueled by the development of the dry gelatin plate, which was significantly more durable and portable than the material used in the earlier wet-collodion process. As imported goods flowed in, they made local manufacturing redundant, precluding any organic or native-driven change in the paradigm of photographic media. Due to the widely variant financial capabilities of Indians, all older machines, methods, and raw material remained in use, creating a strange diversity in levels of technology and sophistication. In Mahadevan’s detailed study, this model of coexistence between outdated machines and the latest media equipment is traced from the early days of cinema to a post-globalization India, where roaming bioscopewallahs still use century-old viewing boxes to show strips from recent films.21

Hands-on technology experience varied widely along the broad spectrum of colonial consumers. The purchasing power of the colonial Indian middle classes was more limited than that of their counterparts in the global north. Photography, for instance, would remain limited on the level of individual consumption well beyond India’s independence in 1947. Innovative products such as the Kodak camera that allowed consumers in the metropolitan West to partake in the production of photographs had an extremely limited sphere of influence in early twentieth-century India. On the other hand, technological novelties that could be incorporated into small-scale commercial enterprises and recycled endlessly gained quick currency.

One such novelty was the magic lantern, a contraption that projected still images onto a wall or screen. Several versions of the magic lantern coexisted with the earliest moving projectors all over the world. In Kalyan, a suburb of Bombay, a certain Mahadeo or Madhavrao Patwardhan created his own version in 1892 and named it Shambharik Kharolika. His sons traveled to different parts of India with a variety of slides depicting narratives from the Indian epics, “thus anticipating the mythologicals of ea...