Globalisation of Indian cinema

Theodore Baskaran

Hindi cinema is getting a lot of attention from academics in recent years, particularly from those in Western universities. In this book most of the writers (14 out of 18) are from the West. This is a collection of scholarly essays in which the writers examine the manner in which Hindi cinema has “reframed relationship between geography, cultural production, and cultural identities.” It is also an assessment of the globalisation of the cinema medium. Hindi films are shown in more than 70 countries, including the Arab nations. Several film scholars look at the Indian diaspora and its relationship with Hindi cinema. Ashish Rajyadhyaksha’s opening paper on ‘Bollywoodisation of Indian cinema’, already featured as part of another book, introduces the subject.

After the appearance of post-colonial and subaltern studies, there has been a migration of scholars from disciplines such as literature, anthropology, and history and, more recently, from theology too into film studies. Indian cinema supplies endless subjects as grist to their academic mill.

The early studies on Indian cinema were mostly by American scholars and this set the pattern for film studies in India also. The characteristics of these works include ignoring the content of the film, its style or the manner in which the subject is dealt with on the screen. Peripheral features of film exhibition such as film magazines, audience, and fan clubs are studied rather than the nature of filmic narration of the cinema examined. Image, the core component of cinema, is often discounted. Film history is also ignored and the subject of film treated as if it is hanging in balance by itself. One reason is that many scholars who immigrated to the discipline of film studies were from literature, oriented to words. You notice that in their work literary theories persist. Note the use of the word text. Another reason is, to examine the contents you need a good command of the language and language-related culture.

In this anthology, Natalie Sarazzini comes near the content of a film when she examines certain aspects of Hindi film music. Though there have been scholarly analyses on this aspect of Hindi cinema (Cinema India brought out a special number on this subject), few have dealt with different types of music in Hindi films such as diegetic and non-diegetic. This paper argues that music is an essential feature of the ‘Indianness’ of Hindi films. Jyotika Virdi’s paper also examines a film, Deewar.

Even when the content of a film is discussed, as is done by Parmesh Shahani while dealing with gay subject in some films, images are not examined at all. The manner in which a subject is visually depicted on the screen forms the essential feature of cinema. I think it is this aspect that has to be discussed while talking about a film. Otherwise it reads as if one is discussing a short story.

The book has an unfortunate title. The term ‘bollywood’ discounts the distinctive character of Hindi cinema. A term floated by some film magazine has stuck. Madhav Prasad in his paper examines this issue. He argues the term does not suggest Indian popular cinema’s derivativeness. There is an odd chapter on South Indian cinema, on Vijayakanth and his politics. In this paper also there is no discussion about his cinema. Producing an anthology presents its own editorial chores. One is uniformity. In this book the end notes are not identical. Some writers have given a bibliography and some others have not. The index is meagre, and the film titles do not have a separate index. The introduction merely gives a summary of each chapter and fails to provide a backdrop to the common concerns of the various chapters. Though the subject is Hindi cinema, none seems to have used any Hindi source.

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