1960s: A Million Hopeful Coloured Dreams
Posted: July 28th, 2012I am a totally unreliable witness of India in the 1960s as I first visited India in 1981. My vision of India in the 1960s is imaginary, thanks to books, but above all to the films of the period.
The ’60s marked the end of the post-Independence Nehruvian Golden Age but filmmakers were looking even further back into the past, when Europeans had barely strayed into the lands of the Great Mughal. The narrator of the voiceover that opens Mughal-e-Azam is of India himself (no Bharat Mata speaking here), recalling a time when Muslims and Hindus mixed and intermarried and India was united, and the great Mughal, Akbar, himself worshipped Krishna.