Frames from the past

A century old, India's movie business is still immature

On May 3, 1913, Sandhurst Road in what was then Bombay was filled with people, jostling to try and get into a barnlike building that had been named the Coronation Variety Hall three years earlier when George V was crowned king-emperor. It isn't known if everyone packing the road had a clear idea of what they were there to see - movies, or the cinematograph as it was then ponderously called, were a new technology. But Dadasaheb Phalke, whose Raja Harishchandra was opening to the public that day as the first Indian movie (and genuinely Indian, since it was silent and thus in no language), certainly knew he was on to a good thing. His film ran for just under an hour, and had an all-male cast since certainly no woman of the time would be permitted to go in front of a camera and act. It was made on a shoestring budget, was produced like a stage play and without a great deal of imagination, and most of the managerial work - catering and costumes, for example - seems to have been done by his long-suffering wife, keeping it all in the family. Fortunately for all concerned, it was a hit.

The Indian film industry - or more properly film industries, since they are now largely separated by language - has, like all others, come a long way since. But in some ways things are oddly unchanged, too. Unlike in the rest of the world, for example, old movie families dominate the business in many parts of India. Few Indian films are recognised outside India as masterpieces of the craft, or as possessing really original stories or film-making techniques. Nor is this a product of India's stage of development, or its emphasis on entertainment - after all, Hong Kong or Korean makers of popular films have been admired widely for decades. There has traditionally been an emphasis on re-telling older stories and revisiting old tropes rather than challenging the audience to rethink its assumption about characters or society; even the self-consciously progressive cinema of the 1950s wedded itself to the young Indian state and its various articles of Nehruvian faith, as the spitting contempt for money in, say Raj Kapoor's Awaara shows. This came with a desire to imitate the cultural passions of the West, rather than improve on them. So Raj Kapoor dressed and walked like Charlie Chaplin, and his brother Shammi Kapoor wore coats patterned on the Beatles'. Some Indian cinemas, particularly those from places with a strongly modern literary culture like West Bengal or Kerala, have done much better than others in creating mass-market movies that nevertheless are both original and high-quality. But, sadly, for most film-makers, that is both too much of a risk and too much effort.

There have been moments of hope - the blossoming of a new wave of film-makers and actors in the late 1970s and early 1980s from state-sponsored academies, for example, or the possibilities held open by the segmentation of the markets promised by multiplexes in the past decade. But Indian cinema is still hostage both to a mindset and to a certain sort of economics. The mindset is one that not only fears innovation in anything other than the technical, but actively disdains it - even mainstream Hindi or Tamil movies featuring young Indians living in the West tend to wind up with the hero choosing a "good girl" for himself, as last year's controversy around the film Cocktail famously illustrated. The economics is a combination of easy profits coming from marketing and not quality - hence the sequence of abysmal "100-crore" movies kicked off by Salman Khan's Dabangg - and decades-long connections with the seedier side of the Indian black economy. Perhaps, with the entry of foreign studios and big business, that at least can change. But a century is a long time to wait for a national cinema that provides inspiration and not just entertainment.