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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