India

EARLY INDIAN CINEMA

The deepest cultural roots of Indian cinema may be ancient: the Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana remain familiar sources for film narratives and allusions, and classical rasa (juice, or flavor) aesthetics is sometimes cited to explain the mixture of diverse elements found in popular Indian films. The central visual interaction of Hindu worship, darshan (viewing), has also been identified as a cultural source for the regular formal reliance on frontal framing and direct address in popular cinema. Theatrical forms such as the Westernized Parsi (or Parsee) theater and the Marathi Sangeet Natak (musical theater) immediately preceded the arrival of cinema and provided more direct sources for some of the techniques (such as the regular incorporation of song and dance) that distinguish Indian cinema, and these also supplied many of the new medium's first performers and financiers. The mass-produced lithographs of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), often depicting Hindu gods and goddesses in naturalistic forms and settings, were also influential transitional works encouraging the adaptation of Indian visual traditions into the realistic media of early photography and film.

Cinema itself first appeared in India when the Lumière Cinématographe was exhibited in Bombay at Watson's Hotel on 7 July 1896. Screenings in Calcutta and Madras soon followed, and by 1898 the Indian photographers Hiralal Sen (1866–1917) (founder of the Royal Bioscope Company in Calcutta) and H. S. Bhatavdekar (b. 1868) began producing short films and recording popular theater performances. Although he was not the first Indian to shoot or exhibit films, the "father of Indian cinema" is justifiably identified as Dhundiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke (1870–1944), whose Raja Harishchandra (1913), drawn from a story in the Mahabharata , initiated feature-length narrative films of distinctively Indian character. According to legend, viewing a film depicting the life of Christ inspired Phalke to put Hindu gods on screen, a motive that aligned him with the swadeshi (indigenous) movement demanding independence from Britain through boycott of foreign 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.