Celebrating One Hundred Glorious Years of Indian Cinema

Raja Harishchandra was the first Bollywood movie that was released in the year 1913. At that time, no one in India had even a minute anticipation that Indian Cinema -- famously known as ‘Bollywood’-- would have such a huge impact on the Indian population. Bollywood has certainly come a long way in terms of both content and technology from a black and white movie in 1913 to 3D cinema today. In 2013, Indian cinema completed a centennial and this is truly one of the most exciting times in the Hindi Cinema industry. NDTV, a proclaimed Indian news portal, has illustrated a timeline of these hundred years through pictures. These pictures demonstrate the prolific journey that Indian cinema has completed through ten different decades, each decade having its own style of cinema.

Cinema actually has been the most vibrant medium for telling India its own story: the story of its struggle of independence, its constant struggles to achieve national integration and to emerge as a global presence. Indian cinema has over time and place, often represented Indian culture, values and traditions. Indian cinema has been a major export success and has emerged as a global brand across Asia, Africa and increasingly, Europe and America.

Bollywood has cast an indelible impression on social mores, from the people’s very psyche to its influence on consumerism in India and across the Indian Diaspora. This anniversary is not just one hundred years of celebrating Indian cinema, it’s indeed a century of soft power and the prevailing influence that Indian Cinema has had on audiences around the world.

The cultural traditions of India have played a significant role in making Indian cinema what it is today. The Indian cinema audience is a heterogeneous mix of tradition-bound illiterate folk to well-educated and modernized Indians. Both of these groups are products of their cultural tradition and the inevitable Western influence respectively. This complex composition of the audience leads to differing expectations that they have from the movies. Popular culture – the culture of mass appeal – that expresses itself through popular arts is the best index of a society's character and orientation. In India, no art form depicts Indian popular culture better than the highly culture-specific Indian popular cinema.

Indian cinema is usually classified into main streams - mainstream cinema and parallel cinema:

Mainstream cinema

Indian mainstream cinema is the family entertainer that usually includes a popular star cast in order to sell the film on their popularity and mass appeal. The mainstream cinema is a spicy mixture of genres; like the curry it is also referred to as “masala films”: a film combining comedy, drama, romance and action. The purpose of this genre is to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible. 1975 film Sholay is the earliest example of masala film, as well as being considered one of the greatest Hindi films ever. A 205-minute-long caper, Sholay follows two petty thieves as they try to capture a bandit for an ex-policeman, with romance, gunfights and tragedy in between. Interestingly, the film was a flop at the box office, but became an overnight sensation after the release of its soundtrack, becoming the hit of the seventies. It remains one of the highest-grossing films in Indian cinema. Sholay was a watershed moment for scriptwriters too, bringing professionalism to this previously poorly paid trade. According to an article in the entertainment magazine Variety, in Indian cinema “romance” is not one of the mold-breaking “Hindie-inides” or new Indian arthouse picks but it is a perfect example of the modern-day Bollywood mainstream. In a country where arranged marriages are still prevalent, Bollywood usually promotes love matches.

Sholay movie trailer

Parallel Cinema

Indian parallel cinema is known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, with a keen eye on the socio-political climate of the times. An article in the Telegraph highlights that “around the middle of the century, Indian cinema saw a move away from the traditional Bollywood film, focusing on life in newly independent India and the problems faced by those who lived there.” Critically acclaimed new wave trilogies include Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which depicts rural Indian life, and Meghe Dhaka Tara, which portrays the struggles of refugees of the partition.

In an interview with Bollywood director Soojit Sircar in an entertainment newspaper; the Hollywood Reporter, Sircar critically evaluates the evolving Indian film audience. He mentions that Indian audiences no longer just want to see “formulaic fare”. As apposed to earlier times, audiences today accept offbeat stories on unconventional subjects such as the arthouse film Ship of Theseus. The fact that Soojit Sircar had faith that the audiences would accept his movie Madras Café demonstrates that the audiences are embracing unconventional social subjects much more openly. Madras Café is a gritty hardcore movie set in the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war. It is not the usual family entertainer or the masala genre film; it's more a movie that would be prevalent in Western cinema.

Going forward, the challenge for the Indian film industry is to use technology in a better way to depict the stories. As mentioned by Bollywood super star Shahrukh Khan in an interview to the Hollywood Reporter, “we have to understand and not overestimate our story telling capabilities. We need to understand how to use technology more creatively.” He also specifies that parallel cinema has grown because of better technology in cameras and post-production: great work can be done at low costs.