Indian Cinema in the World
The Indian government facilitated the export and sale of Indian “new wave” or “art” films around the world in agreements negotiated at the festivals. Meanwhile, ironically, audiences in the West were encountering a wider range of India’s cinema, including its commercial film offerings, than available in India’s official film festivals which were hawking Indian art cinema to a global audience. The Pearson collection contains valuable documents of this parallel history of Hindi commercial cinema in the West. It was in these decades that the first scholarly book-length studies of Indian cinema emerged in the Anglo-American academy: notably, Eric Barnuow and S. Krishnaswami’s Indian Film (1st ed. 1963; 2nd ed. 1980), pictured below.
The collection includes a booklet for the first retrospective of Indian films screened in Paris, France in October 1968, Panorama du Cinema Indien for which Indian filmmaker and film historian B.D. Garga wrote the foreword. An article by Garga on Indian commercial cinema had appeared in the French daily Le Monde in 1962. A page from the retrospective, and the Le Monde’s cinema listings page from 18th October 1968, with Indian cinema screenings highlighted, are pictured below.
Influential essays from Rosie Thomas, Behroze Gandhy, and others in the 1980s, further shaped the agendas of academic Indian film studies. In 1982, Thomas and Gandhy co-organized a London festival of Indian commercial cinema titled Bombay Spectacular that showcased Hindi commercial cinema from the 1950s through the 1970s. The festival (and an accompanying exhibition of Indian popular visual culture of postcards, calendar art, and photos), contrasted Hindi commercial cinema’s confident and self-reflexive embrace of the exotic, the glamorous, the traditional, and a mythologized West, with Western “exoticization of India”.
In November that year, BBC’s Channel 4 was launched, committing to a weekly Sunday matinee devoted to Indian commercial cinema for Britain’s vast South Asian audiences, who till then, had consumed Hindi cinema in community halls or purpose-rented movie theaters for short runs not lasting a week. Illustrative are two undated flyers in the collection announcing screenings of massively successful Hindi movies from 1977 and 1979, in London’s South Asian-rich suburb of Southall in the art deco Dominion Cinema (now razed), and in Paris’s Cinema Avron.
The last set of images presented here belong to an invitation card for a screening of Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool/Paper Flowers/Fleurs de Papier (1959, Hindi). The movie was screened in Cinemascope on 1st December 1984, as part of the screening program for Le Festival des Trois Continents, in Nantes, France. The admit pass includes Guru Dutt’s signature. The screening was part of the “Films Sans Frontières” series and was co-presented by Libération, the French newspaper co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre.