A cinematic passage to India

The sense of mystery about India that has traditionally surrounded it is long gone. The India of today is hardly represented by wicker baskets with snake charmers coaxing hooded serpents patiently out. Even milkmen in rural areas have cell phones now, while‘being Bangalored’ is a commonly used phrase globally, and Indian entrepreneurship is on the rise. It is only natural then that the Indian film industry has moved with the times and undergone a huge change as well.

India has an illustrious cinematic past, of course. Decades ago, Satyajit Ray created masterpieces like his Apu trilogy, which are still hailed by film critics the world over. His brand of filmmaking continued with directors like Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and Shyam Benegal. Other regions of India also produced cinema that can stand the test of time, such as Mani Ratnam’s Nayagan in 1987, the story of a real-life underworld don in Bombay.

More often associated with mega-budget sets, larger-than-life stars and gaudily-dressed extras in never-ending songs, Indian films have slowly graduated to a no-nonsense, realistic art form, an art form that somehow got lost along the way with 80’s and 90’s commercial ‘Bollywood’ films, with few exceptions. Today, a host of original scripts are making their way to the screen and attracting an audience of their own, thanks to the burgeoning construction of multiplexes in India, which afford viewers a completely different viewing experience compared to the old format single-screen theatres. One of India’s biggest commercial film production houses, Yash Raj Films, ventured into producing a film targeted for an international audience for the first time in 2007. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures Entertainment finally acknowledged the huge business opportunity presented by Indian films and entered hitherto untested waters by producing Saawariya, a typically ‘Bollywood’ fairytale drama, said to be based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights.

With the corporatization of cinema in India came professionalism and the freedom to create stories that are about the new India. In the last four years alone, we have small-budget films like Manasarovar by first-time director Anup Kurian, which traces the story of two brothers and their independent interactions with the same woman a few years apart. Shot in English and set in Kerala, it has a small film feel but a worldly story that is intrinsically Indian. Meanwhile, director Navdeep Singh’s debut feature Manorama Six Feet Under depicts the story of an amateur detective in a small Indian desert town. Another first-time directorial venture, Khosla Ka Ghosla, by director Dibakar Banerjee narrates the travails of a middle-class Indian family and their run-ins with land sharks in Delhi. Such dynamic film projects are making the Indian film industry one that is no longer just about big budget films with even bigger film stars like Shah Rukh Khan or Aishwarya Rai (both of whom are so popular now that they have wax likenesses in Madame Tussaud’s in London). Today we can find Shah Rukh Khan, arguably India’s biggest film star, lending his name to an off-the-beaten-track subject in 2007’s Chak De India, that was a commercial success as well. Said to be based on a true story, the film depicts the story of a defeated hockey player who returns to coach the country’s women’s team.

Yet, for a country that produces the largest number of films in the world, India’s history with the Oscars has been checkered. In 1956, Mother India made it to the Best Foreign Language Film nominee list for the first time, followed by Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! in 1988 and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan in 2001. Over the last few years though, purely commercial, weakly scripted films were sent as the country’s official nominations, when quality and dynamic films like those mentioned earlier existed alongside. In 2002 we had the costume drama Devdas being nominated, and another costume drama, Paheli, in 2005. Last year’s nomination to the Oscars was probably the most criticized, a film called Eklavya-The Royal Guard, which had big stars but not much of a story. It is possibly part of a trend started by Lagaan in 2001, which had big names and so more financially strong people to push the film’s visibility at an international level.

Critical film viewers cannot be blamed for having numerous questions about the recent direction of the Film Federation of India, and blogs are rife with questions and speculations. Bhavna Talwar, the director of Dharm, a film that was pipped to the post by Eklavya in the final selection, even went so far as to take legal recourse on the grounds that the selection committee was biased. Eklavya of course never made it to the final Oscar nominee list for Best Foreign Language Film anyway, but the issue begs the larger question of how transparent the nomination process is. The process followed by the Academy itself is quite transparent, but what is the process followed by individual countries, specifically India? As it stands today, the general public is certainly in the dark.

It may sound simplistic to say that good films should get the attention they deserve, but more often than not, because they are made without enough financial backing (at least in India), they don’t. Sarthak DasGupta, director of the forthcoming independent feature The Great Indian Butterfly, a film based on an urban couple’s relationship in a changing India, makes an interesting point. He says that cinema which carries the contemporary Indian voice, whether in subject or treatment, is likely to resonate better in international juries' minds. Statistically, he thinks, independent films in India tend to represent this voice more than commercial films.

One solution, maybe, is for big studios to support good-quality, independent Indian films and not just the more commercial fare. These decisions could wind up being commercially astute as well. Miramax, for example, co-produced the multiple award-winning The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which clearly sits in the usual independent film category. Another is for the Film Federation of India to consciously ensure through a transparent system that good quality films truly representing a country’s mood are sent for awards like the Oscars, because this will give a much-needed boost to these films and will ultimately cause a domino effect on the Indian film industry as a whole.

Published in Seven Magazine, 13 April 2008