Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

India
goods. Following Phalke’s lead, well over a thousand
silent films were produced in India, but the fact that
few have survived frustrates accurate accounts of the first
decades of cinema produced in India.
In 1906 J. F. Madan’s Elphinstone Bioscope
Company in Calcutta began regular film production,
and by 1917 Baburao Painter established the
Maharashtra Film Company in Kolhapur. For the following
two decades, an expanding studio system would
ensure steady film production throughout India: by the
early 1930s, major studios such as New Theatres
(Calcutta), Prabhat (Pune), and the Bombay-based
Kohinoor Film Company, Imperial Film Company,
Wadia Movietone, Ranjit Movietone, and Bombay
Talkies offered audiences commercially differentiated
genres and distinctive stars. Himansu Rai’s Bombay
Talkies, organized as a corporation, relied on European
financing, technology, and talent (notably the German
director Franz Osten [1876–1956]); in 1940 Rai’s widow
and the studio’s biggest female star, Devika Rani (1907–
1994), took over the company. India’s first sound film,
Alam Ara (1931), directed by Ardeshir M. Irani (1886–
1969) for Imperial, firmly established the importance of
song and dance sequences in popular Indian cinema as
well as the future identification of Indian films along
regional lines determined by language. By the following
year, V. Shantaram (1901–1990) began to direct innovative
films in both Marathi and Hindi for Prabhat
(often starring the legendary actress Durga Khote
[1905–1991]), demonstrating Indian cinema’s quick
adjustment to new sound technologies as well as different
linguistic markets. However, as Bombay became the center
of Indian film production, a variety of spoken
Hindi—or Hindustani—would soon establish itself as
Indian cinema’s dominant screen language.
INDIAN CINEMA AFTER INDEPENDENCE
Amid the deprivations of World War II (including shortages
of raw film stock), increased colonial censorship, a
devastating famine in Bengal, and the traumatic partition
of India and Pakistan upon independence in 1947, the
studio system in India came to an end. But the optimism
of the era embodied by the first prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru (who served from 1947 to 1964), also
led to a revitalized Hindi cinema under the impact of
new independent production companies established by
key directors like Mehboob Khan (1907–1964) and
Bimal Roy (1909–1966). In addition, actor-directors like
Raj Kapoor (1924–1988) and Guru Dutt (1925–1964)
became brand names in the industry: Kapoor created
R. K. Films; Sippy and Rajshree Films became the banner
for several generations of the Sippy and Barjatya
families, respectively; and brothers B. R. (b. 1914) and
Yash Chopra (b. 1932) created their own B. R. Chopra
and Yashraj production companies. Previously unknown
artists dislocated by Partition arrived from the newly
created state of Pakistan and rose to stardom as actors,
directors, or producers, becoming urban legends. The
rich body of films produced in the 1950s, the decade
following independence, frequently balanced entertainment
and social commentary, the latter often supplied
by an infusion of talent affiliated with the leftist
Progressive Writers Association and the Indian Peoples’
Theatre Association, a talent pool that marshaled cinema
for covert political messages before independence and
continued to project Nehru’s optimism about nationbuilding
for about a decade after independence. Driven
by stars and songs, the popular cinema firmly established
itself in the daily lives and cultural imaginations of millions
of Indians as well as audiences in the Soviet Union,
China, and elsewhere. This ‘‘golden age’’ of Hindi cinema
was ending just as Satyajit Ray’s first films were
receiving international attention, and the 1960s would
draw sharp distinctions between formulaic commercial
cinema and what would be called the New Indian
Cinema, the latter signaling both a shift in form and
content as well as a reliance on state-sponsored financing
never available to mainstream cinema.
The 1970s was a period of rising worker, peasant,
and student unrest. In this changing political climate,
films became more strident in addressing endemic corruption
and the state’s inability to stem it, and upheld the
victimized working-class hero as challenging the status
quo. These films, including Deewar (The Wall, 1975)
and the massive hit Sholay (Flames, 1975), became the
insignia of superstar Amitabh Bachchan (b. 1942), who
embodied the ‘‘angry young man’’ during Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi’s ‘‘Emergency’’ clampdown on civil liberties
(from 1975 to 1977) and into the mid-1980s. They
departed significantly from 1950s films in their lack of
optimism and from 1960s films in the radically truncated
attention to the hero’s romantic love interest. However,
from the late 1980s on, the eclipse of Bachchan’s centrality
coincided with the revival of romance that
returned to the screen as a culture war between the
youthful (often Westernized) couple in love and their
tradition-bound parents. In record-breaking hits like
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Hearted Will
Take the Bride, 1995) and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who
Am I To You?, 1994), balancing the rights of rugged
individualism and duty toward family and community
took center stage.
These films arrived against the backdrop of the
Indian state’s abandoning forty years of Nehruvian
socialism for a market-driven ‘‘liberalized’’ economy at
the end of the Cold War. Alongside these romance films
about the changing family and the private sphere were
14 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM