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Music
Love, humor, pathos, anger, heroism, terror, disgust, wonder
and serenity are the nava rasas or nine basic emotions which are fundamental to
all Indian aesthetics. Sage Bharata, the earliest Indian musicologist said to
have lived in the 1st or 2nd century AD, enunciated these moods and believed
that it was the musician's task to evoke a particular emotion or mood. The
classical music tradition in India is based on the principles enunciated by sage
Bharata and continues to be a form of meditation, concentration and worship.
The Raga, or musical mode, forms the basis of the
entire musical event. The Raga is essentially an aesthetic rendering of
the seven musical notes and each Raga is said to have a specific flavor
and mood.
Tala is what binds music together. It is essentially a
fixed time cycle for each rendition and repeats itself after completion of each
cycle. Tala makes possible a lot of improvisations between beats and
allows complex variations between each cycle.
With the help of the Raga, Tala and the infinite shrutis
or microtones, Indian musicians create a variety of feelings. The melodious
sounds of a musical rendition can evoke the innermost emotions and moods of the
audience, connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs alike.
Today, the Indian Musical tradition has two dominant strains:
the Carnatic or South Indian music and the Hindustani or North Indian music. The
Carnatic and the Hindustani music have some features in common as their heritage
and philosophy is essentially the same. However their ragas and their
articulation are usually distinctive.
The Northern school of Indian Music can boast of names like
Amir Khusro (13th century) and Miyan Tansen who lived in the court of the Mughal
Emperor Akbar in the 16th century. The great musicians of the Southern style
include Venkatamakhi (17th century), Thyagaraja and Shyama Shastri.
All Indian musicians belong to a particular gharana
(house) or school. Each gharana has its own traditions and manner of rendition
and these styles are fiercely guarded and maintained. Some of the well-known
gharanas are those of Delhi, Agra, Gwalior and Jaipur.
Today, there is a lot of interaction and concourse between
music from the north and that from the south. Both styles are influencing each
other and this can only lead to an enrichment of the great musical tradition of
India.
Dance
Using the body as a medium of communication, the expression of dance is
perhaps the most intricate and developed, yet easily understood art form. Dance
in India has seeped into several other realms like poetry, sculpture,
architecture, literature, music and theatre. The earliest archaeological
evidence is a beautiful statuette of a dancing girl, dated around 6000 B.C.
Bharata's Natya
Shastra (believed to be penned between second century B.C. and second
century A.D.) is the earliest available treatise on dramaturgy. All forms of
Indian classical dances owe allegiance to Natya Shastra, regarded as the fifth
Veda.
It is said that Brahma, the Creator, created Natya, taking literature from
the Rig Veda, song from the Sama Veda, abhinaya or expression from the Yajur
Veda and rasa or aesthetic experience from the Atharvana Veda. It
also contains deliberations on the different kind of postures, the mudras
or hand formations and their meanings, the kind of emotions and their
categorisation, not to mention the kind of attire, the stage, the ornaments and
even the audience. All dance forms are thus structured around the nine rasas
or emotions, hasya (happiness), krodha (anger), bhibasta
(disgust), bhaya (fear), shoka (sorrow), viram (courage), karuna
(compassion), adbhuta (wonder) and shanta (serenity). All
dance forms follow the same hand gestures or hasta mudras for each of
these rasas. The dances differ where the local genius has adapted it to
local demands and needs.
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Theater
India has a longest and richest tradition in theatre. Origin of Indian
theatre is closely related to the ancient rituals and seasonal festivities of
the country. The traditional account in Natya Shastra gives a divine origin to
Indian Theatre
According to legend, when the world passed from the Golden Age to Silver Age,
and people became addicted to sensual pleasures, and jealousy , anger, desire
and greed filled their hearts. God Indra, with the rest of the gods, approached
Brahma, the Creator of the Universe, and begged for a mode of recreation
accessible to all classes of society. Brahma acceded to this request and decided
to compose a fifth Veda on Natya. From the four Vedas he extracted the four
elements of speech, song, mime and sentiment and thus created Natyaveda,
the holy book of dramaturgy. He asked Indra to pass the book to those of the
Gods who are skillful, learned, free from stage fright and given to hard work.
As Indra pleaded the gods' inability to enact the play, Brahma looked to Bharata
and revealed the fifth Veda to him by God Brahma himself. Thus, when the
dramatic art was well comprehended, the first drama was enacted on the
auspicious occasion of Indra's Banner Day.
The Natya Shastra legend indicates an intimate relation between the idea of
dancing and dramatic representation. Dance has an important role in the birth of
Indian theatre. As dance is a function of life, even from the primitive to the
most cultured community, drama finds a semi-religious origin from the art of
dancing.
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Film
Films arrived in India less than a year after the Lumieres first exhibited
their cinematographie in Paris. On July 7, 1896, an agent who had
brought equipment and films from France first showed his moving pictures in
Bombay. That was an important day in the social and cultural history of the
Indian people.
The first Indian-made feature film (3700 feet long) was released in 1913. It
was made by Dadasaheb Phalke and was called Raja Harishchandra. Based on
a story from the Mahabharata it was a stirring film concerned with honor,
sacrifice and mighty deeds. From then on many "mythologicals" were
made and took India by storm. Phalke's company alone produced about a hundred
films.
What little remains of Indian silent cinema up to 1931 barely fills six
video-cassettes in the National Film Archives of India, but it is remarkable for
the way traditional "theatrical" framing (static characters, faced
front on by the camera) is animated by a considerable investment in location
shooting, both in natural surroundings and in the city. This is evident not only
in Raja Harishchandra, but also in historical-cum-stunt films such as Diler
Jigar/Gallant Hearts (SS Agarwal; 1931) and Gulaminu Patan/The Fall of
Slavery (SS Agarwal; 1931), and in the international co-productions directed
by Himansu Rai and the German Franz Osten. Among these, Light of Asia
(1925), about the Buddha, and Shiraz (1928), about the origins of the Taj
Mahal, referred to as 'Romances from India' by their producers, render
"India" as a startling, exotic assemblage: scenes of ancient and
medieval court life, attended by the ritual of courtly gesture, and by
spectacular processions of elephants and camels, are juxtaposed with a
glittering naturalism.
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The Advent of Sound
By the time of the First World War, and the phenomenal expansion of
Hollywood, 85% of feature films shown in India were American. But the
introduction of sound made an immediate difference. In 1931, India's first
talkie, Alam Ara, was released, dubbed into Hindi and Urdu. As the
talkies emerged over the next decade, so too did a new series of issues. The
most prominent of these, of course, was language, and language markets;
alongside, there are considerations of regional identity, of the different
places that separately and together make up India. Many films of the time were
produced both in the regional language (Bengali, Marathi), and in Hindi, so that
they could be oriented to the larger Hindi-speaking market. The Indian public
quite naturally preferred to see films made in their own language and the more
songs they had the better. In those days, the films made had upto 40 songs. This
song tradition still persists in Indian commercial cinema.
The 1930s and 40s
While addressing social differences of caste, class and the relations between
the sexes, the "social" films of the 1930s adopted a modernist outlook
in an essentially converging of society. Many directors of the time showed great
innovation. The Marathi director, V Shantaram, for example, was alert to world
trends in film-making, deploying expressionist effects intelligently in such
works as Amrit Manthan (Prabhat Talkies; 1934).
In what was probably the most important film of the period, Devdas (1935),
the director Pramathesh Barua created a startlingly edited climax to a tale of
love frustrated by social distinction and masculine ineffectuality. Released in
Bengali, Hindi and Tamil, Devdas created an oddly ambivalent hero for
this period (and again, through a Hindi remake directed by Bimal Roy in 1955),
predicated on indecision, frustration and a focus on failure and longing rather
than on achievement.
By the 1940s the social film further delimited its focus by excluding
particularly fraught issues, especially of caste division. A representative
example, prefiguring the kind of entertainment extravaganza that has become the
hallmark of the Bombay film, was Kismet/Fate (Gyan Mukerji; Bombay
Talkies, 1943), which broke all box-office records and ran for more than two
years. Family and class become the key issues in the representation of society,
and the story's location is an indeterminate urban one.
Although this became the model for popular cinema, especially after the
decline of regional industries in Maharashtra and Bengal by the end of the
1940s, different strains are observable in the Tamil films of the same period.
In the 1930s, the Tamil cinema gained national recognition with the costume
extravaganza, Chandralekha, directed by SS Vasan for Gemini studios, and
called by its director a "pageant for our peasants" (a large section
of the audience would have been illiterate). Its story, of the conflict for the
inheritance of an empire, is laden with overblown set-pieces and crowds of
extras. Even more significant than this investment in the spectacular was its
"Tamil-ness", the recognition of a national existence different to
that portrayed in the Bombay output.
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The 1950s
By the start of the 1950s, Calcutta became the vanguard of the art cinema,
with the emergence of the film society movement at the end of the 1940s and
Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali/Song of the Road, produced with West
Bengal state government support in 1955. Post-independence, despite a relatively
sympathetic government enquiry in 1951, the industry became the object of
considerable moral scrutiny and criticism, and was subject to severe taxation. A
covert consensus emerged between proponents of art cinema and the state, all
focussing on the imperative to create a "better" cinema. The Film and
Television Institute of India was established at Pune in 1959 to develop
technical skills for an industry seen to be lacking in this field. However,
active support for parallel cinema, as it came to be called, only really took
off at the end of the 1960s, under the aegis of the government's Film Finance
Corporation, set up in 1961 to support new film-makers.
Ironically, this pressure and vocal criticism occurred at a time when
arguably some of the most interesting work in popular cinema was being produced.
Radical cultural organizations, loosely associated with the Indian Communist
Party, had organized themselves as the All India Progressive Writers Association
and the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). The latter had produced Dharti
ke Lal/Sons of the Soil (KA Abbas; 1943), and its impact on the industry can
be seen in the work of radical writers such as Abbas, lyricists such as Sahir
Ludhianvi, and directors such as Bimal Roy and Zia Sarhady.
In addition, directors such as Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and Mehboob Khan, while
not directly involved with IPTA, created films that reflected a passionate
concern for questions of social justice. Largely studio-based, the films of this
era nevertheless incorporated vivid stylistic experimentation, influenced by
international currents in film-making. Such effects are evident in Awara/The
Vagabond (Raj Kapoor, 1951, script by KA Abbas), Awaaz/The Call (Zia
Sarhady; 1956) and Pyaasa/Craving (Guru Dutt; 1957).
The First International Film Festival, held in Bombay in 1951, showed Italian
works for the first time in India. The influence of Neorealism can be seen in
films such as Do Bigha Zamin/Two Measures of Land (Bimal Roy, 1953), a
portrait of father and son eking out a living in Calcutta that strongly echoes
the narrative of Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thief (1948). Mehboob Khan's Andaz/Style
(1949), an upperclass love triangle founded on a tragic misunderstanding, draws
on codes of psychological representation - hallucinations and dreams that
feature strongly in 1940s Hollywood melodrama. Mehboob's tendency to make a
visual spectacle of his material, and his involvement with populist themes and
issues make him a good example of popular cinema of the time.
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The Art Cinema
India's emergent art cinema, led by the Bengali directors Ray, Mrinal Sen and
Ritwik Ghatak reacted against such spectacle. Satyajit Ray's world-famous debut,
Pather Panchali (1955), is based on many of the themes that engaged
contemporary popular film-makers of the time, such as loss of social status,
economic injustice, uprootment, but sets them within a naturalistic, realist
frame which put a special value on the Bengali countryside, locating it as a
place of nostalgia, to which the urban and individualist sensibility of its
protagonist, Apu, looked with longing.
In Ray's later work on urban middle-class existence, Mahanagar/Big City (1963),
Charulata (1964), Seemabadha/Company Limited (1971), Pratidwandi/The
Protagonist (1970), and Jana Aranya/The Middleman (1975), his
rational, humanist vision is at the same time at home in the city, and repulsed
by it; overarching estrangement is relayed through images of futile job
interviews, cynical corporate schemes, murky deals in respectable cafes. Wedded
to the traditions of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, he finds society
wanting, vilifies it for its ignorance and corruption, and oversees the
malignant terrain below with a lofty disdain. Ray's women, such as the mother,
Sarbojaya of Pather Panchali, the tomboy Aparna Sen of Samapti/TheEnd(1961),
Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata and Mahanagar, and Kaberi Bose in Aranyer
din Ratri, are splendidly drawn portraits in the realist tradition.
In contrast to Ray, his contemporaries Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak set out
to expose the dark underside of India's lower middle-class and unemployed. Sen,
after a phase of uneven, didactic political cinema at the height of the
Maoist-inspired Naxalite movement of the early 1970s - marked by the trilogy Interview(1971),
Calcutta 71(1972) and Padatik/The Guerrilla Fighter (1973) - made
two films, Akaler Sandhane/Search of Famine (1980) and Khandar/Ruins
(1983), about film-making itself, exploring its inherent distance and
disengagement, and the problems entailed in trying to record
"reality".
Perhaps the most outstanding figure of this generation, fulfilling the
potential of the radical cultural initiatives of the IPTA, was the great Ritwik
Ghatak. Disruption, the problems of locating oneself in a new environment, and
the indignities and oppression of common people are the recurrent themes of this
poet of Partition, who lamented the division of Bengal in 1947. Disharmony and
discontinuity could be said to be the hallmark of Nagarik/Citizen (1952)
and Meghe Dhaka Tara/Cloud-capped Star (1960), where studio sets of
street corners mingle uneasily with live-action shots of Calcutta. There is
something deliberately jarring about the rhythms of editing, the use of sound,
and the compositions, as if the director refuses to allow us to settle into a
comfortable, familiar frame of viewing. In Aajantrik/Man and Machine
(1958) and Subarnarekha (1952, released 1965) he juxtaposes the displaced
and transient urban figure with tribal peoples; placing the human figure at the
edge of the frame, dwarfed by majestic nature.
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The Indian Popular Cinema and the Superstars
During the 1960s, popular cinema had shifted its social concerns towards more
romantic genres, showcasing such new stars as Shammi Kapoor - a kind of Indian
Elvis - and later, Rajesh Khanna, a soft, romantic hero. The period is also
notable for a more assertive Indian nationalism. Following the Indo-Pakistan
wars of 1962 and 1965, the Indian officer came to be a rallying point for the
national imagination in films such as Sangam/Meeting of Hearts (Raj
Kapoor, 1964) and Aradhana/Adoration (Shakti Samanta; 1969).
However, the political and economic upheaval of the following decade saw a
return to social questions across the board, in both the art and popular
cinemas. The accepted turning point in the popular film was the angry, violent Zanjeer/The
Chain (Prakash Mehra; 1973), which fed into the anxieties and frustrations
generated by the quickening but lopsided pace of industrialization and
urbanization. Establishing Amitabh Bachchan as the biggest star of the next
decade, its policeman hero is ousted from service through a conspiracy, and
takes the law into his own hands to render justice and to avenge his deceased
parents.
The considerable political turmoil of the next few years, including the
railway strike of 1974 and the Nav Nirman movement led by JP Narayan in
Bihar and Gujarat, ultimately led to the declaration of Indira Gandhi's
Emergency in 1975. It was as if the state and the people had split apart. As the
cities grew, so did the audiences. The popular cinema generated an ambiguous
figure to express this alienation. At the level of images, there was a greater
investment in the stresses of everyday life and, unlike the 1950s, in location
shooting. In Zanjeer, the casual killing of a witness on Bombay's
commuter trains conjures up the perils of life in the metropolis. This is echoed
in images of the dockyard, taxi-rank, railtrack and construction site in Deewar/The
Wall (Yash Chopra; 1975), also starring Amitabh Bachchan.
The recurrent narrative of these films, of protagonists uprooted from small
town and rural families to the perils of the city, is shared by the street
children researched by professional sociologists in Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay
(1988). The Bombay films' very excesses, their grand gestures, and the priority
given to emotion and excitement may more truly reflect the dominant rhythms of
urban life in India. At the level of plot and character, however, the Bombay
films simultaneously simplify and collapse our sense of India, reducing the
enormous variety of identity - social, regional, ethnic and religious - that
makes up Indian society. Where these identities appear, they do so as
caricatures and objects of fun.
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The Art Cinema of the 80s
To counter this, the art cinema of the 1980s diversified from its Bengali
moorings of the earlier period under the aegis of the Film Finance Corporation.
Works by Shyam Benegal, Gautam Ghose, Saeed Mirza, BV Karanth, Girish
Kasaravaili, Mrinal Sen, MS Sathyu, Ray, and Kundan Shah, among others, actively
addressed questions of social injustice: problems of landlord exploitation,
bonded labour, untouchability, urban power, corruption and criminal extortion,
the oppression of women, and political manipulation. Ghatak in particular had
addressed many of these issues earlier, but never had there been such an
outpouring of the social conscience, nor such a flowing of new images - of
regional landscapes, cultures, and social structures. Many of the films may seem
didactic and uncomplex, undercutting the attention to form that had marked the
earlier period - but not all. Benegal's first two films indicate an unusual
concern with the psychology of domination and subordination. Ankur/The
Seedling (1974), starring Shabana Azmi, is particularly striking not only
for this but also for the open, fluid way it captures the countryside. Among
Kannada directors, working in south India, Kasaravalli in Ghattashradha
(1981) effected an intimate vision of the oppression of widows through the view
of a child. And special mention must be made of Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do
Yaaron/Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (1984), a wonderful exercise in farce and
slapstick that is also a brilliant portrait of Bombay.
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The South
The most notable of the directors who speak specifically about their own
cultures, and about the possibilities of change, are Adoor Gopalakrishnan and
Aravindan from Kerala. A key to their productivity was the overall development
of film culture in Kerala, India's most literate state. In his films
Gopalakrishnan transformed the lush countryside, busy towns and animated culture
of Kerala into a strange, dissociated place, fraught with communicative gaps,
menacing, inexplicable characters, and an overall sense of the impenetrable.
Subjects range from the mounting tragedies that beset a young couple in the city
(Swayamvaram/One's Own Choice; 1972), and the effete authoritarianism of
a declining feudal landlord (Elippathayam/The Rat-Trap; 1984), to the
mysterious spiritual decline of a popular communist activist (Mukha Mukham/Face
to Face; 1987).
The late Aravindan, sometime cartoonist and employee of the Kerala Rubber
Board, had something of the mystic in him, but went through a range of styles,
including a cinemaverite approach, as in Thampu/The Circus Tent
(1978), in which circus performers speak direct to the camera. His episode from
the Ramayana, Kanchana Sita/Golden Sita, places the action against the
grain of the high Hindu tradition by situating it among tribes in the verdant
landscape of the Kerala forests. At his best, his narrative style refuses a
didactic approach, generating a whimsical sense of how destinies are shaped.
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Contemporary Indian Cinema
In the 1990s, video, national and satellite/cable television have resulted in
the development of a prolonged crisis in India's movie industry, where
commercial and art films are equally at risk of failing at the box office. The
problems of the latter are mainly due to a persistent failure to find
distribution outlets. Now, more and more film-makers of both streams look to
television. The state film finance unit (now named the National Film Development
Corporation) has a major stake in the expansion of the national network.
There have been two responses to this crisis. The first, at the economic
level, has been to try and curb film piracy, and to systematize the relationship
of film to video. The second is an investment in new technology, and in new
forms of story-telling. The Telugu and Tamil industries, and directors such as
Ram Gopal Varma and Mani Ratnam, are at the forefront of such moves, showing a
lively interest in new techniques in American cinema. Varma's Shiva (1990)
and Raat/Night (1991) showcase the use of steadicam - in the latter, to
the exclusion of any serious narrative. The technical virtuosity of Mani
Ratnam's works as well as their elegant story-telling and restrained
performances have attracted a following among film buffs across the country, who
identify with his style and, implicitly, with the image of a dynamic, modern
identity. In 1993, Ratnam made an important breakthrough with Roja, a
love story about a young Tamil peasant woman and her husband, a cryptographer
who decodes messages for military intelligence. The couple are transported to
Kashmir, which is subject to sustained separatist extremism. Embroiling the
Tamil couple in a national issue that might have seemed remote to an earlier
generation, the film identified a new pan-Indian field of interest. Dubbed into
Hindi, it was a national success, giving rise to the dubbing of a number of
southern films
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