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Abstract

The Bombay film industry began in 1896 with the exhibition of imported films and soon diversified into production of feature-length films. Adventure romance films dominated the silent period. With the onset of the talkies, romantic melodrama mixed with social realism dominated by music became the principal film genre of Bombay cinema . This cinema is thought to have reflected the social reformist agenda of the Nehruvian state. The 1970s saw the advent of the multi-generic entertainment extravaganza replete with dramatic dialogue and spectacular song and dance sequences (popularly referred to as masala films). The masala film continues to dominate Bombay film production and has, since the 1990s, assumed global popularity.

Full Text

It could be said in hindsight that the Bombay film industry began with the first exhibition of films in India in 1896. But it was the money and a thriving film culture generated by exhibitions in the first decades of the twentieth century that laid the foundations of the industry. From 1913, when the first proper feature-length was produced, until the present day the industry has churned out thousands of films and in the process moved from a position of extreme cultural marginality to one of global success and critical attention. Beginning with predominantly mytho-folkloric films, the industry quickly discovered the charms of the romance film and the attractions of the romantic star in the 1920s and these have remained its chief selling points. In the 1930s, however, a marginal trend of social realism made a deep impact on the generic output of the industry and its history since then has been that of negotiating the tensions between social realism and the adventure romance. The coming of the talkies brought with it the dramatic entry of music, something that defines the industry in most people's minds. Today, Bombay cinema is seen as an exotic spectacle consisting of music, extravaganza, romantic fantasy and melodrama. It is seen as an ideal escapist entertainment genre catering to the needs of all classes of audiences, skilfully manipulating music, melodrama and realism to reach out to the middle and working classes.

Social realist and adventure-romance films came into separate existence in the 1920s and for a brief period in the 1930s the two came together in the mass popular cinema market in the films of Homi Wadia featuring Fearless Nadia. However, even in the 1920s Sulochana, the first superstar of Bombay films, regularly performed in films belonging to both genres. But in the post-independence era the industry shifted predominantly to the romantic melodrama centred mostly around questions of social reform of marriage and class. The adventure-romance, although highly popular, was banished to the B-film circuit. The 1950s saw the stars and directors that the Bombay industry is most remembered for come into form - Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Nargis, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand. This decade and the following one saw the production of such film classics as Awaara , Mother India , Pyaasa , Do Bigha Zameen , Madhumati , Mughal-e-Azam , Guide and many more. The industry too came to attain mass popularity as most parts of India were reached by the medium. Musically these decades produced a corpus of film song classics that are remembered, heard, seen and sung even today. Songs were mostly pop versions of Indian light classical and folk music mixed with Broadway musical styles. By the 1960s music directors like S. D. Burman had begun to introduce jazz and rock rhythms into Hindi songs. The films of this period have received maximum critical attention in scholarly writing, most writers seeing in the social-realist romance the embodiment of the Nehruvian ideology of reform through the creation of the ideal Indian citizen. One strand of criticism has chosen to call these films the 'feudal family romance' representing the societal tensions in Nehruvian India caught between traditional social relations and modernity.

From the mid-1960s, however, films took a turn towards the multi-generic entertainment extravaganza and the return of the adventure romance to the centre of Bombay cinema . Sholay , recently voted the top Indian film, was a perfect melange of the adventure romance melded with older social realist cinema tic norms albeit with inflections from Sergio Leone and the Hollywood Western. Adventure romance was adapted into the social realist realm through the action film that reached maturity with the arrival of Amitabh Bachchan, arguably the most significant filmic icon in Bombay cinema 's history. Mainstream 'angry young man' films moved towards B-Hollywood action cinema rather than the Hollywood new wave. Some critics see the increasing emphasis on individual vigilante heroism in the films of this period as a symptom of the crisis of the Indian state that culminated in the imposition of a national emergency in 1975. Musically the 1970s was dominated by the oeuvre of Rahul Dev Burman who covered the entire gamut of new musical trends from jazz-funk, fusion and folk-rock to the California sound while keeping the basic Indian light classical and folk lines in place. The next two decades saw Hindi film music dissolve into the global spread of club music and influencing emerging trends in rap and rave music in England.

Since the 1970s the multi-generic entertainment extravaganza, popularly referred to as masala films, has remained the basic format of the popular Hindi film. In the 1990s, however, a new wave of directors consisting of Mani Rathnam, Ram Gopal Varma and Vidhu Vinod Chopra amongst others brought in a tougher political edge to Bombay cinema adapting lessons learnt from the Indian parallel cinema movement of the 1970s, Hong Kong cinema and the Hollywood new wave. Other filmmakers turned towards extravagant family melodramas with Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . . ! , considered by many critics as an extended marriage video breaking all box-office records. Recent writings on this cinema have emphasised the impact of the tensions generated by economic liberalisation in India that has profoundly affected Indian lifestyles and generated new kinds of social tensions of which the rethinking of the relationship between tradition and modernity has come to occupy centre-stage. Bombay cinema has gone global with unprecedented audiences flocking the world over to watch a 'Bollywood film'- a term that is resisted by the industry itself as disparaging in its implication of Bombay cinema being a poorer cousin of Hollywood.

Bombay cinema remains a critical enigma for film scholarship (and for non-Indian viewers). Despite attempts to read inflections of historical resonance into the films they remain remarkably resistant to any easy ideological readings. Traditional tools of scholarship like genre analysis, readings of star images or literary critical deconstructive moves have failed to reveal the relationship between society and cinema . Two things need to be emphasised. Firstly, this cinema fits into a different kind of audience attention where absorption into the film narrative in terms of conventional narrative complexity is minimal. It is seen to fit into a world of urban life where very few people have the time to watch films and think about them in terms of high cultural discourse. This lends Bombay films a sheer performative immediacy that resists literary readings (this is probably one of the reasons why historical writings on Bombay films have focused mainly on pre-1970s cinema ). Secondly, the Bombay film is predominantly built in terms of its sonic structures with the main impact of the film depending on a complex layering of sounds that encompass dialogue, music and songs. The sonic map of the film sets up the rhythm of the film, acting being subsidiary to sound. Additionally, the material aspects of the image - clothing fashions, urban domestic lifestyle artefacts and public spaces - refer back to contemporary popular culture practices with an immediacy that makes them difficult to historicize. A historical deconstruction of Bombay cinema would be tantamount to writing a sensual social history of modern India, a difficult task to achieve. However this very mix of melodrama, romance and ironic reportage-style ethnography is the secret of why Bombay cinema continues to affect Indians in such profound ways even today.

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