Posted: February 2nd, 2016
Among the few silent films that remain are three Indo-German co-productions that predate the arrival of the German technicians and directors who worked in the Bombay Talkies studio in the 1930s. The Light of Asia was shot in India but edited and processed in Germany and intertitled in English. The script was adapted from Sir Edwin Arnold’s epic poem The Light of Asia (1861) while the opening credits proclaim it was “Shown by Royal Command at Windsor Castle, April 27 1926” and that it benefited greatly from help offered by the Maharaja of Jaipur. The film shows westerners touring India (Mumbai, Delhi, Varanasi) who come to Bodh Gaya, the site of Gautam Buddha’s Enlightenment. An old man tells the story of the life of the Buddha, from his royal childhood to his death, allowing the film-makers to juxtapose Orientalist fantasies alongside fascinating, if anachronistic, images of Rajasthan in the 20s.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
The newly released film on Milkha Singh,Bhaag Milkha Bhaag,is one of a growing number of Hindi biopics made in recent years. Bollywoods masala films wildly mix genres. But producers and audiences have always identified genres from mythologicals and devotionals to gangster and action and now biopics are becoming increasingly popular.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
In India the boundaries between animals, humans and gods are extremely porous. Souls are held to transmigrate across these boundaries; gods may take on animal or human form – or both simultaneously – as Vishnu does in his ten incarnations, or Ganesha who has an elephant head and a human body. Nor are elephants entirely confined to any one of these categories, for they are partly divine and seem very human. Famous elephants, including the distinguished Kesavan, who stood 3.2 metres in height and served the Guruvayoor temple in Kerala for over fifty years until his death in 1976, were thought to be an incarnation of the deity. A life-size statue of Kesavan stands guard outside the temple, garlanded and honoured by a procession of elephants every year on the anniversary of his death. Temple vendors still do a brisk business selling photographs of him, and near-lifesize cut-outs of this celebrity animal welcome travellers to airports in Kerala. A popular film adaptation of his life made in 1977 portrays him to be very human in his morality and devotion, although when he dies, his soul is shown leaving his body and joining the divine, dropping a lotus as an offering at the feet of his beloved god, Guruvayoorappan.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
We didn’t want to put three Bollywood stars on the cover of pay flippant tribute by way of a fashionably declaim photo shoot. To mark a century of Indian cinema, we put together an estimable panel of cinephiles, critics and industry folk, who selected a list of 100 memorably scenes from films across the country.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
The seeds of my elephilia were sown when I was a child, with elephant toys, and stories from Babar to Rudyard Kipling’s “Toomai of the Elephants”. When I began my study of India as an undergraduate learning Sanskrit, I was intrigued by the elephant imagery in courtly literature. Women had the gait of an elephant (gajagamini), thighs like elephant trunks, and breasts like an elephant’s head bumps; while men were like mountain-raging elephants. I also became enchanted by Ganesh, not so much for his cuteness, but for being simultaneously human, animal, and divine.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
When in 1996 I first thought of writing about Yash Chopra, many people in India asked why him when there were other equally interesting figures working in the film industry. What prompted the question was that Yash Chopra’s career spanned several phases, with quite distinct breaks between them. At this stage, the new type of ‘Bollywood’ cinema that he pioneered was just emerging and its earlier history had been largely forgotten. Yashji’s life and work followed the arc of development of Hindi cinema from the 1950s to the new globalising India of today. His films offer wonderful insights into the imagining of India and its society through these six decades.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
Although little is as unfunny as the study of comedy, Sigmund Freud’s 1905 book, The Jokeand its Relation to the Unconscious, argues that comedy arises when thoughts and emotions that lay hidden in the subconscious are expressed consciously.
Hindi film melodrama foregrounds the emotions and blends them in its inimitable masala, so we can, as Amitabh Bachchan says, leave the cinema with a smile on our lips and a tear in our eye. Hindi films are notable for their surfeit of emotion, or what could be called melodramas. The audience doesn’t feel the same emotion as the character, that is, it doesn’t necessarily identify with him or her. If the character is angry with himself we may feel pity rather than share the anger (or a mix of the two), but when it comes to the body emotions-fear, laughter, tears-if we don’t respond with the right emotion, then the film isn’t working. We can read the film differently-so a truly dreadful movie can be funny rather than romantic, as can a horror film, but if a comedy doesn’t make the audience laugh then we must all go home.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
Rajesh Khanna, India’s first superstar, was adored by his fans for decades, but has never been given any academic recognition. Although he was the major star of the early 1970s, he was so eclipsed by Amitabh Bachchan‘s hip and brooding persona that his role in the film industry has been neglected.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
The biopic has been a relatively unproductive genre in Indian cinema, despite the massive international critical and commercial success of the Indo-British biopic, Gandhi (1982, directed by Richard Attenborough) and its hatful of awards, among them eight Oscars. Although biopics form only about 5% of Hollywood’s output, they have high visibility and an enviable success rate at the Oscars, which are unlikely to have escaped the notice of the Indian film industry and its critics, who keenly observe global awards and Hollywood ones in particular. Over the last few decade, few Hindi biopics have been made, yet many more are planned. What’s going on, and why is interest in the biopic peaking now?
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
The massive success of Bodyguard has confirmed Salman Khan as a phenomenal star, surpassing even his record-breaking Dabangg.
Academics and journalists have discussed Aamir Khan’s extraordinary talent as a producer and marketer as well as his risk-taking selection of roles as an actor, and Shah Rukh Khan’s rockstar qualities, which could launch him internationally if he wasn’t busy getting on with being so successful in India.
But we seem to have forgotten Salman, the third of the trio of Khans that were part of the shift from ‘Hindi cinema’ to ‘Bollywood’ in the 1990s and its rehabilitation among India’s metropolitan elites.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
Muslims have long played a major role in the Indian film industry. The industry has given us many Muslim iconic figures such as actor Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan, seen as the actor’s actor in Hindi cinema), actresses Madhubala (Mumtaz Jehan Dehalvi, for many the greatest beauty to grace Bollywood screens) and Waheeda Rahman (often in roles that cast her as a life and love tormented female before she was cast as that most quintessential of all Bollywood characters: the even more long suffering Ma). There have been great directors such as Mahboob and Kamal Amrohi. Since the 19990s, its biggest male stars are the three Khans: Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, who no longer change their names to sound ‘modern’. Yet, Muslim characters in Bollywood, as it is known since the 1990s, are doomed to minor roles fated simply to represent their community and conform to a series of well-established stereotypes. Hindi films usually have lead actors and actresses who are north Indian upper-caste Hindus, who can be seen as ‘normal Indians’, while characters from other regions or religions are usually typecast, not infrequently in negative roles.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2016
It’s harder to pick a favourite character than a favourite star. The latter is always attractive and charismatic but often not an interesting character. While in real life we may prefer people of “good character”, the rogue in a story or a film is often more appealing than the hero or heroine. As the Wife of Bath is my favourite character in The Canterbury Tales, so I prefer Geeta to Seeta, Shyam to Ram, Anthony to Amar and Vijay to Ravi. These characters are all good at heart but their lives have often taken wrong paths, making them all too human.
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Posted: January 31st, 2016
India: A Sacred Geography by Diana L Eck
Winston Churchill claimed that “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.” While the second part of his statement has been proved wrong, it is unlikely he had any idea quite what the first part meant. While India is indeed a geographical term, it has a dual geography, a physical one, but also a sacred geography which dates back millennia.
Posted: August 26th, 2014
His film about India’s Father of the Nation was enough to guarantee Attenborough’s greatness.
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Posted: July 28th, 2012
I 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.
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