Regional Cinema

Indian films are made in several major languages. “Regional cinema”, denotes cinema in languages other than Hindi, which is one of India’s two official languages (the other being English). After independence, state boundaries were drawn on assumptions of linguistic homogeneity that overlapped with culture and territory, with each state possessing its officially recognized state language.

In commercial cinema, through the 1960s, Hindi and other language films were also produced in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu, in Madras (today Chennai), which was home to some of the most well-organized movie studios outside of classical Hollywood (the decline of many iconic movie studios in Bombay, the center of Hindi films, is dated to two decades earlier). The Pearson Collection includes a detailed 27-page promotional booklet of a big-budget Hindi production, Bahut Din Huwe (Once Upon a Time, 1954, S.S. Vasan), by Madras’ Gemini Studios that touts the studio’s formidable infrastructure and technology.

However, by the 1970s, state and language-based film industries had become the norm (Tamil cinema in Tamil Nadu; Telegu cinema in Andhra Pradesh; and so on) as the Madras studios also entered a period of decline.

Several prominent art filmmakers also worked in regional languages such as Odiya, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bengali. The combination of “authentic” language and setting -- the depiction of customs and rituals, for instance, within otherwise fictional narratives -- lent the power of documentary and ethnographic truth to regional art cinema's images for Indian and transnational audiences alike. Then again, art filmmakers like Shyam Benegal made movies in Hindi but set in southern or other non-Hindi speaking states, transforming the regional into an aesthetic.

The International Film Festival of India’s Indian Panorama section, established in the 1970s, further consolidated the idea of an Indian cinema curated by language/state. Some regional languages have large numbers of overseas speakers (Tamil in Singapore for instance), underscoring regional identity’s transnational extensions. The Punjabi industry has had strong ties to Mumbai’s Hindi industry because of Partition (see for instance, the publicity image for a 1976 Punjabi film, Santo-Banto, starring major Hindi film stars and character actors such as Dharmendar, Shatrughan Sinha, and Aruna Irani).

The idea of regional cinema then is a complex one, conceptually and historically; yet it was also a tangible way of making sense of the complexity of the subcontinent’s filmmaking landscape. The Pearson Collection contains materials related to sizeable numbers of Punjabi (both Indian, and Pakistani), Bengali, and Tamil commercial films, and art films in several other languages (Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, to name a few).