Indian Cinema in the 1970s: A Brief Introduction to Its Major Forms

The Pearson Collection contains documents pertaining to all major categories of feature-length filmmaking in the Indian subcontinent. Post-independence (1947) Indian cinema was defined by a contradiction that lasted more than five decades, till the late 1990s. On the one side was its prolific and hugely popular commercial film industry, producing nearly 600 films a year in the late 1970s for entertainment. This industry was criticized by elites as "escapist" and subjected to significant taxation and censorship by the government. On the other side, was a serious "art" cinema, funded and feted by institutions established by national and state-level governments, as evidenced in the brochure below for a Telugu-language movie, and screened in few dedicated screening venues by film societies and film festivals, and broadcast on national television to urban audiences.

Scholars have recently painted a more complex picture of this battle between popular commercial cinema and an unpopular but state-patronized art cinema. Government institutions funding art filmmakers sought to impose strict and dire conditions on filmmakers for recouping production costs. Even within art cinema circles, there were debates on aesthetics and politics: some art filmmakers were suspicious of artistic experimentation, and thought "serious" cinema ought to be more mindful of audiences and ought to have a "social purpose". Several commercial filmmakers, for their part, strove to make more "realistic" films on ordinary middle-class life. And some art films, such as Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974), a story of caste and feudalism in the countryside, were funded by urban advertising agencies and did well at the box office. Several art films circulated in bootleg copies for dispersed and likely very large "cult" audiences. Despite these ambiguities in discourse and reception, art and commercial cinema looked broadly different.

Commercial films, such as Daaku aur Jawaan (Bandit and Soldier, 1978), could be nearly three hours long, highly melodramatic, and strung together a bit of action, romance, comedy, and song-dance numbers into a storyline that ended when villainy was vanquished, a moral community restored, families reunited, or elder approval granted to the romantic couple. This came to be known as the "masala" film because of its mélange of ingredients. Rarely does the plot of a commercial film from this era make sense without the depth of "generational" time that shapes relations between characters, and without an understanding of the kinship relations and community roles that define the function of all characters, major and minor.