Indian Film Culture.P65 - federation of film societies of india

(Ideology of the Hindi Film, 1999) undertakes a similar
exercise although his approach can be categorized as
post-Marxist and is less empirical than these two works.
While Hollywood has been studied in ways that serve
the cause of cinema as an ongoing project - through
studies of film style, genres, auteurs and conventions
devoted to filmmaking method - such an approach was
by and large lacking in studies of Indian popular cinema.
My own book (Seduced by the familiar: Narration and
Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema, 2008) attempts to
correct this imbalance by inquiring into the grammar of
popular cinema and also by ‘surface interpretation’ of
films from the silent era to 2007. Where ‘deep’
interpretation reveals the meaning that the film divulges
to academics with theoretical preoccupations, ‘surface’
interpretation is attentive to the concerns of the audience
that the film is meant for, although the ‘surface meaning’
is often far from apparent. My argument is that Indian
cinema’s methods have an underlying philosophical
consistency and that the surface interpretation of film
texts demonstrates how cinema reconciles an inherited
worldview with the historical demands of the present.
It must be noted here that an
overwhelming proportion of the
serious work done on Indian
popular cinema has been
produced by academics in
universities in the West – often
as part of doctoral dissertations.
While the above are book-length inquiries into the popular
film that employ a single identifiable argument, there are
also works that separately examine different issues
relating to certain kinds of popular cinema like Lalitha
Gopalan’s Cinema of Interruptions : Action Genres in
Contemporary Indian Cinema (2003) and Valentina
Vitali’s Hindi Action Cinema : Industries Narratives
Bodies (2008). The demands of academia have also seen
a burgeoning of anthologies - with accommodating titles
like Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (eds.) Bollyworld:
Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens
(2005). Still, influential writing on Indian popular cinema
is not always book-length and the many important studies
– in essay form - are often found in well known
anthologies like Ravi Vasudevan (ed.) Making Meaning
in Indian Cinema (2000).
August 2010 / Indian Film Culture 28
This suggests that much of it has been overseen by those
with little familiarity with Indian cinema – the actual
shape it has taken and its attractions to its audience.
Their emphasis – judging from the writing – is more on
the intellectual tools to be employed than on the objects
upon which the tools are to be used. Critics/ theorists are
apparently preoccupied with cinema’s influence in the
public space rather than in cinema itself. This is the
expressed approach of Ashish Rajadhyaksha in his recent
Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood
to the Emergency (2009).
While academic study of Indian cinema is the kind most
favored in film studies departments, there have also been
other books that are not academic. Among those that can
be called ‘essayistic’ - because they are taken up with a
certain aspect of a certain kind of cinema – are Ranjani
Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City,
(2007), which tries to look at how Mumbai is dealt with
in the Hindi film, Rachel Dwyer’s Filming the Gods:
Religion and Indian Cinema (2007), Vijaya Mulay’s From
Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond: India in
International Cinema (2010) and Rajinder Kumar
Dudrah’s Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies
(2006). Equally important are anthologies like Vinay Lal
and Ashis Nandy’s (eds.) Fingerprinting Popular Culture:
The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema (2006).
There are also appreciations of film directors and film
actors, which are more biographical than critical: Nasreen
Munni Kabir’s Guru Dutt: a Life in Cinema (2005), Jerry
Pinto’s Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (2006)
and Meghnad Desai’s Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the
Life of India (2004).
Surprisingly, ‘reviewing’ has never done well in India
and it is an art that few critics have pursued successfully
in book length. Khalid Mohammed was perhaps our most
successful newspaper reviewer but he does not appear to
have produced a book of his reviews. TG Vaidyanathan’s
Hours in the Dark: Essays on Cinema (1996) was perhaps
the first important collection of reviews after Chidananda
Das Gupta’s reviews and Satyajit Ray’s Our Films: Their
Films (reprinted 2001). Chidananda Das Gupta’s best
writing is also collected in Seeing is Believing: Selected
Writings on Cinema (2008). Since the most acclaimed
works in Indian cinema has never been reviewed alongside
each other, I tried to find a remedy in my own book 50
Indian Film Classics which was brought out by
HarperCollins in 2009. It includes critical studies of films