New breed of producers, directors and actors responsible for change.
By Madhav Khanna
CHICAGO: Indian cinema has gone through a paradigm shift in the past few years. We have moved from the inane babbling of children to the musings of an adolescent. To say that Indian cinema has come of age would be taking it a step too far, yet we have made large strides in our development.
Yet the question arises who is to be credited with causing this shift in Hindi cinema? To answer this question, we must look back in history to the years after Independence when the Indian cinema was at its zenith. Satyajit Ray, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt are the stalwarts that made up the first Golden Age of Indian cinema.
They were dreamers who saw film as a religion, not just as a profession. Their love for storytelling was unparalleled. This passion allowed them to be true to their subject and tell a story as it was meant to be. This idealism, which should have been built on after their deaths, instead died with them.
As a result, for 50 years later, we were left languishing in the proverbial gutter of cinema. With a few exceptions here and there, the general standard of films and filmmakers has been abysmal. It was the degradation of a great cinematic tradition into a commercial exercise done not for the sake of the movies but for the sake of the moolah it generated. The Renaissance had given way to the medieval age!
This brings us to the year 2001 when after half a century of mostly inane and mindless movies we see light at the end of the tunnel. With movies like Satya, Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai, it was as though the Indian film industry had rediscovered the art of telling a story.
Since that landmark year, we have seen a marked shift in the style and narratives of films being made. The script now replaces the item number; the star by the character; the moneyed producer by the all-powerful director. The horizon today has a producer willing to back the vision of a director, the actor who is no longer the star but merely another character playing a part in the larger vision. Between this is the director, who steadies the ship through the troubled waters, till shore is reached. The Hindi film has finally arrived… Again!
This change was made possible by a new breed of producers, directors and actors, who have rediscovered a passion for the movies which was so dearly lacking in the decades past. Producers like Manish Mundra, Guneet Monga and Ashvini Yardi have become enablers, who back projects not because of their financial merit but on the strength of the story.
Directors like Shoojit Sarkar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibaker Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, R. Balki and Neeraj Pandey, to name a few, have redefined what a Hindi movie is. Their guiding belief is the script and the story that needs to be told and nothing else.
Actors like Irrfan Khan and Nawazuddin Siddique, along with the so-called commercial stars Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Ranbir Kapoor, are now finally what they were always meant to be, characters in the hands of the directors, albeit some lesser than others. Every part of the machine called the movie has realized that only when the whole functions in synchronous harmony will the bell toll.
This gets us back to the original question of who is the prime mover behind this new golden age in Indian cinema? Is it the director, the producer or the actors? I believe it is all this and much more.
In the globalized society that is India today, we are tired of the same hash up of make-believe and we long for some morsels of realism in cinema. The Indian audience still loves their songs and romances as long as they come with at least a half believable story.
With rising levels of affluence, thanks to 25 years of economic growth, higher levels of education and most of all more exposure to the world outside of our four walls, we have, as an audience, come to appreciate the finer things in life. From the success of the recently released Piku and Badlapur, we know that the audience is ready to accept a story, which may not be what many called Bollywood Masala.
The cinematic universe is now much larger and much more accepting than what it was. This has been possible due to the audience. Without the tacit acceptance of the viewer, even the Mona Lisa would look like just another women in a painting.
We are at the beginning of a movement, which has taken a decade to get off the ground. With every passing day, the movies get better and success is for the worthy and not merely privileged stars.
The Indian moviegoer is on course to becoming a connoisseur and not merely a mindless consumer. We want the nuance, the subtle humor, and the dramatic moment that makes us think. We want it all. In the movies it is said that the show must go on, thankfully, it is moving forward with a vigor and passion we have never seen before. Behold the new golden age of Indian cinema.
(Madhav Khanna is Engineer by training, Energy Trader by profession, philosophy and pop culture enthusiast by choice.)
Read more from Madhav Khanna:
- From Satya to Badlapur – the great Indian thriller genre in Bollywood (March 3, 2015)
- Aamir Khan is out of tune with humor: AIB Roast should go on (February 11, 2015)
- Six Bollywood movies to look forward to in 2015 (January 9, 2015)