In two States of the South – Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh – the serious creative cinema was hardly permitted to take its birth. NTR proclaimed himself against it in an interview. MGR is not known to have made any overt statements to that effect but his actions, such as the pattern of entertainment tax he established, were clearly calculated to prevent any non-conformist cinema from taking root. In Tamil Nadu, it is hardly possible to succeed in politics without succeeding in the cinema. Now wonder, the State leaders have never been anxious to allow any other kind of cinema to grow, not to speak of prospering. Kerala, with the ideological values projected by its strong Marxist [ethos] had the realist cinema carve out a niche for itself, catering to sections of the intelligentsia. Karnataka has maintained more of a middle – of – the – road position, neither precluding nor fostering, except for a while in the 1970’s, a cinema that addressed social reality directly, and not through the prism of unmediated myths.

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Cinema arrived in India from France on 7th July 1896 when in Mumbai’s Watson Hotel (now Army & Navy Building, near present-day Kala Ghoda in Esplanade area), six short silent movie strips, made by Lumiere brothers of Paris, were shown to the local elite. Three years later, in 1899, a still photographer ofMumbai, Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar (later known as Sawe Dada) shot a movie strip in 1899; the first ‘wholly Indian’ silent feature film, Raja Harishchandra came to be made, 14 years thereafter, in 1913, by another Marathi D G Phalke. In nine decades thereafter, some 33 thousand films, long and short together and including over 1300 silent, have been released. In 1971, India with 431 feature films made that year, overtook Japan to become the world’s largest film-producing country. Annual production has since doubled, even more in some years, taking India further ahead of major filmmaking countries. Joined together, India’s movie films can twice girdle the earth’s circumference at the Equator.

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In more than a century, Indian cinema has grown and diversified enormously. One wishes, this exponential growth was reflected in quality too. The world acclaimed films made by Satyajit Ray and some of his offbeat successors but the much larger, mainstream cinema remains the favourite of common cine-goers, not only in India but in many other Asian and some African countries too. Western people (except Asians abroad) did not take much note of it till recently, when some Hindi mainstream films- some of them shot, premiered and distributed abroad- ran well in European cities. In Pakistan, Indian films are banned but secretly sell and circulate in cities in pirated DVD, VCD and video cassettes. As Nirad Chaudhury once observed, cinema has become the ‘most widely appreciated and easily understood cultural expression in India’. The film industry in six cities- Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram-thrives on the massive patronage of popular cinema, which is as far removed from the offbeat genre as Pushpin is from poetry.

It the offbeat cinema, more than the mainstream, truly reflects the conscience of the Indian people. The latter does not lack in conscience but its reflection is often so phoney that it can hardly be called ‘the conscience of the race’. Offbeat films may not interest many people for their stark realism and disturbing themes but their makers never fail to treat them conscientiously.

- By Bibekananda Ray