The Indian Film: Must Bombay Follow Hollywood?
by DONALD THOMAS and HARISH KUMAR MEHRA
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WHEN Dada Phalke, India’s pioneer film director, cameraman, set-designer, make-up man, and one-man studio, first translated and produced the well-known Indian legend of Raja Harishchandra in 1913, he had no idea that he was actually creating an industry which would one day bring in millions of rupees, employ millions of Indians, and influence the thought of still more millions. The story he told was a simple one: Raja Harishchandra was a king who sacrificed his kingdom and his family on the altar of truth; the rest can be imagined by anyone who has ever seen a movie.
Today the Indian film industry is the second largest in the world. In India, 600,000,000 people see 200 movies every year. There are more than 2,000 picture houses. The earnings of the film companies equal more than twice the total income of all newspapers and publishing houses in the country. The film is unquestionably India’s most powerful medium of mass communication — a fact which cannot be overlooked, no matter how disconcerting it may be to our writers and artists.
It was not always so. In the early days actors milled about among the lower strata of an inelastic society. Fathers trembled at the thought that their sons and daughters might embrace the drama, for down the years the theatre had provided livelihoods only for vagabonds and wastrels. And the technical difficulties of the first films were staggering.
Think, for instance, of the problem of music. In the dim past, when the Indian empire extended to Cambodia, music belonged only to the palace or the temple. It wore the devotional dress of the bhajan (hymn) or the courtly dress of the ghazal (lyric). It passed from one generation to another, among the ballad singers and temple attendants, in a form so strict that it was considered an impiety to make the slightest change in its two-octave notation. Its limited themes and narrow range made it unsuited to the sound track. Now all that is changed. Music directors in the great film studios evolved new, more flexible systems of notation, new instruments, new concepts of orchestration, until now the Indian film music composer works in a synthesis of ancient and Western ideas which allows him greater freedom and a greater range of techniques. Lovers of classical Indian music consider the new “film music,”with its “soft” harmonics, a cultural abomination, but the masses find it very definitely to their taste.
The film in India is a child of the theatre. But it was not the well-organized theatre known in the West. It was the theatre of a few poorly financed repertory companies which toured the chief cities presenting mythological or historical dramas in a high-brow, stilted tongue. The first actors and directors were recruited from these companies, and even today the Indian film retains some of the characteristics of the traditional drama. It lays greater emphasis, for instance, upon the spoken word than upon visual effect, and the camera has yet to realize its full potential. Films like The Bicycle Thief and Rashomon, even the early comedies of Charlie Chaplin, could never have been made in an Indian studio, for in them an intelligent use of the lens conveys greater expression than the words of the script writer. For its mass appeal the Indian film relies on lengthy and sentimental dialogue. Should interest flag, a song is introduced. The inheritance of the stage lingers on.
One of the first things a foreigner is apt to notice about Indian films is that they are too long — though no Indian film has beaten the record of Gone with the Wind. But it is true that the tempo of story development in an Indian film is slower than in those of England and America. Indian films are produced for a people steeped in a tradition of long and patient endurance. Here time has stood still for centuries and a couple of thousand extra feet of film are only a drop in the ocean of eternity. This is characteristic of the whole Indian way of life. Indians who are used to religious songfestivals that last all night and to poems that take six weeks to recite will not be bored by a film that lasts three hours or more.
The film in India has evolved as a cultural medium in four different and distinct schools, which we call after their geographic origins.
The first is the Bengal school: On the eastern coast of India, producers in the State of Bengal set out. to bring films closer to life and literature, and they made many films based on the Bengali classics. The first in the series was Devadas, directed by Barua. Devadas told the story of the influence of drink on a man’s life. Since then, the Bengal branch of the industry has taken the lead in producing purposeful films of a high literary quality.
The Maharashtra school: On the western coast of India, in the city of Poona in Bombay State, the Prabhat Film Company made the first attempts to depict social and political problems of the day. Shantaram, who made his name in the Maharashtra school, is today considered one of the greatest directors of the Indian screen. His films are realistic and human; Admi, the story of a man who falls in love with a prostitute, is a good example. But the films of the Maharashtra school are all produced in Marathi, the language of the province, and hence they do not attract as wide an audience as the films of Bombay.
The Bombay school: About 1935, in India’s most cosmopolitan city and the chief center of the film industry, Himansu Rai and his actress-wife, Devika Rani, began making pictures with the trade name of “Bombay Talkies.” “Bombay Talkies” made films of an astonishingly high technical quality under the supervision of a foreign staff. Romance was the keynote, and each film was a variation on the traditional triangle.
The Punjab school: A little more than a decade ago a new trend, which now is supreme in the Indian film industry, was born in North India. The Punjab school imitated Hollywood. Music, comedy, splendor, and romance were the ingredients of every production. Now, led by the Punjab film, the whole Indian industry tries to follow the Hollywood pattern — though without the resources of Hollywood. Music and romance are the substance of the Indian film today.
Yet we cannot discount the wide appeal of a more serious type of picture — the so-called “socials.” These “socials” are cinema stories dealing with contemporary social, political, and economic problems, and they have achieved a remarkable popularity. The reasons for this success are not difficult to understand. India is a country in transition — from medievalism to modernism, from feudalism to industrialism, from foreign rule to freedom and self-government. Indians are intensely conscious of all sorts of political, social, economic, and emotional problems. Caste and untouchability, widow remarriage, unemployment, famine, religious differences— all these are matters which impinge directly on every Indian’s life. Thus the “socials,”because they deal earnestly, though often sentimentally, with such problems, attract much attention. They may well prove to be an important factor in India’s transition to a modern state.
Language is, of course, one of the film’s major problems in India, as it is for literature as well. Films are produced in at least six regional languages —Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam — besides Hindustani, the language of North India which is more or less understood throughout the rest of the subcontinent.
This confusion of tongues does not, as one might at first suspect, cause too severe an economic problem: films produced in any of these languages can find a sufficient audience to support a thriving industry. But it does mean that any unified body of criticism and informed opinion is impossible. Consequently many Indian films still seem somewhat provincial and amateurish in their attitudes and techniques. Whether or not the educated elements of Indian society will eventually be able to produce a unified national attitude toward the films — or toward anything else — remains to be seen.
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THE Indian film industry has grown to its present size in spite of a more rigid censorship code than is to be found anywhere else, a code which mirrors the puritan attitude of the large orthodox element in Indian society. A kiss is never registered on the screen; no emotional violence is allowed. Surprisingly, this restraint has come with “ modern ” times, with the era of India’s independence. In the days of silent films and the early talkies, kissing and bathing scenes were included in almost every production. But now most film scenarios are love stories which could be read from the pulpit without causing the slightest stir in a religious audience.
In this respect, the Indian film industry is a strange amalgamation of Hollywood and India. Though it strives to follow the pattern of Hollywood, it succeeds only in external appearances.
The star system, for instance, is very strong in India: most Indian movies today are written and directed to glorify the talent and personality of an individual actor or actress. The stars receive large incomes and considerable publicity. Yet the Indian film colony is a tame community compared to Hollywood. There are no divorces, no night clubs, no fabulous homes. The Indian star leads a simple life. The Hollywood gossip columnist would go out of business in India.
The star system and the influence of the stage are the two principal factors which have determined the nature and content of the Indian film of today. And while, as a result, it is often too remote from reality, it is happily free from propaganda. The Government of India has its own Films Division to produce documentaries and newsreels. Except for a rigid moral code, the government does not in any way interfere with privately produced films. In this sense, the Indian film producer has retained full freedom of expression and his position resembles that of his American counterpart. Alas, in both cases this freedom has too often been exploited to promote a crass and ugly kind of commercialism.
In one way the Indian film producer is better off than his colleague in America: he has virtually no competition. In a country without an organized theatre or community recreation centers, with few libraries, no cheap radio sets, and no television at all, the motion picture offers the only source of inexpensive entertainment. People fill the movie houses because, too often, they have nowhere else to go. And recently the film people have been invading the rural areas with mobile projection units which put on shows in village squares.
Today the Indian film is beginning to receive attention outside India. The International Film Festival held in Bombay in 1952 attracted films from every major film-producing country. The Indian picture, Aan, has been shown in London, New York, Paris, and elsewhere, as have the documentaries made by the government. It is to be hoped that this international attention will help somewhat to change the Indian film industry from a monolithic commercial enterprise, which only occasionally rises to true artistic distinction, to a more responsible agent of cultural achievement.
All things considered, the outlook is not unpromising. The film, in India as elsewhere, is potentially the supreme form of expression, capable of incorporating the best from all the arts. And in many Indian studios producers are conscious of this potential and are attempting as well to integrate the film with the real life of the people. Seldom has history provided the artist with a richer subject than Indian society offers to its film makers today.