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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Hindi cinema’s B-listers
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Hindi cinema’s B-listers

What if India's first film were an Orientalist fantasy rather than an epic-inspired morality tale?

‘Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies’ by Rosie Thomas, Orient BlackSwan, 325 pages, Rs 875Premium
‘Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies’ by Rosie Thomas, Orient BlackSwan, 325 pages, Rs 875

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke is regarded as the progenitor of Indian cinema, and the first Indian film is taken to be the mythological Raja Harishchandra, but what if the honour were to be bestowed on another film and another kind of cinema?

British academic Rosie Thomas’ Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies sets out to map a loose history of Indian cinema from below—not looking at the classics but at so-called lowbrow entertainment, which comprises stunt and fantasy films and mythology. A collection of essays written over the years, Bombay Before Bollywood excavates what Thomas calls the “ephemera" of popular film culture—the films that might not be included in a countdown to mark the centenary of

Indian cinema, or considered “good" or “respectable" examples of entertainment. Scholarship about the early years of cinema is handicapped by the paucity of documentation as well as the very real problem of the gradual loss of witnesses to those decades. “While there is still time, we need to be looking at the variety of what is out there and not just be obsessed with contemporary notions of good cinema," said Thomas during a recent visit to Mumbai.

Rosie Thomas
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Rosie Thomas

“Rather than beginning with a 40-minute Hindu myth, Indian cinema would kick off with a confusingly culturally hybrid tale from the Arabian Nights, set within an Islamic fantasy world and keying into global Orientalist obsessions at the high point of cultural modernity," writes Thomas, who teaches film at the faculty of media, arts and design at the University of Westminster in the UK. Europe and many other parts of the world were rolling out films, plays and dance performances inspired by Arabian Nights translations at the time, she points out. The history of early Indian cinema might have been written very differently if there had been a greater emphasis on fantasy and stunt films from the first few decades.

Mythologicals and devotionals started “fading out of view" by the early 1920s, she said, and “from the mid-1920s onwards, production was dominated by stunt and action, costume and fantasy film, alongside, of course, a growing trend for ‘socials’." A yearning for respectability among film-makers and audiences might have led to the elision of an under-explored, but rich vein of film history—the so-called B and C circuit films, which were cheaply produced but profitable, targeted at working-class and rural audiences and exploring a different version of “cosmopolitan modernity" located in tales of the Orient, magic and irrational themes, and which lead directly to the so-called masala action film popular in the 1970s and 1980s. “I started to understand my work of the 1980s once I started to do this work on the earlier period," Thomas said. Manmohan Desai, for instance, was the son of fantasy and stunt film director Kikubhai Desai, and he apprenticed under special effects provider Babubhai Mistry, who had worked previously on several such films.

Fearless Nadia
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Fearless Nadia

One section of Thomas’ anthology focuses on fantasy and stunt films, including Wadia Movietone’s Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy Lal-e-Yaman, the action adventures of Fearless Nadia and Homi Wadia’s Zimbo Finds A Son and Khilari, both produced for his own banner Basant Pictures. Jamshed Wadia and his brother, Homi, who later married Nadia, feature prominently in Thomas’ narrative, chiefly because of their well-preserved archive of films and written material. Thomas is planning a separate book on the banner, which was founded by Jamshed in 1933. Homi split from his brother and set up Basant Pictures in 1942, but both banners continued to mine the territory that is covered by the book. “The emphasis on the Wadias is simply because their stuff is more preserved," said Thomas.

Thomas trained as a social anthropologist, but abandoned the study of kinship and pilgrimage sites to focus on the worship of the silver screen. She first came to India in 1978, “completely unprepared", she said, and found that most people were interested in what was known as “good cinema"—the arthouse fare being supported by the National Film Development Corporation, for instance. But she made friends with actor Smita Patil, who was appearing in a film being produced by Mohan Segal, who introduced Thomas to the ways of the business. “I wasn’t aware of B and C grade cinema at the time, that differentiation came later," Thomas said. She was riveted by the magical element-laden cinema of Manmohan Desai, and later became acquainted with the Wadias.

By the 1960s and 1970s the B-grade and C-grade movies were represented by action films and horror titles, mostly produced by the Ramsay Brothers, and they were relegated even further to the margins. “The big films swallowed up the conventions of the cheaply made stunt films, mythological and fantasy films, but it took a while for them to die out," Thomas said. A history as told from below allows us to make connections between lowbrow entertainment and the uptick in slickly produced masala films in the 1970s, she argues, and the pattern continues into the present day. “Currently, it is true that almost every aspect of film production has been transformed—as has India…The challenge is on to analyse cultural flows in a complex world. But it was ever more or less thus. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same)."

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Published: 24 Feb 2014, 06:42 PM IST
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