A still from Q's movie 'Gandu'
A still from Q's movie 'Gandu'

The mainstream and the margin

Reflections on the independent film scene in India.
A still from Q's movie 'Gandu'
A still from Q's movie 'Gandu'
Throughout its short history, cinema appears to have fallen prey to countless categorisations. I tend to think that while this approach has its advantages – we like our art history organised into neat piles – it doesn't do justice to individual talent, to the sui generis. And so, calling De Sica a neo-realist and assigning to Godard the pigeonhole of the nouvelle vague adds little to my understanding of the complex and evolving visions of these filmmakers. For the same reason it's strange to find Satyajit Ray being termed a figurehead of that geometric absurdity called 'parallel cinema', as though this movement was progressing in the same direction, albeit from a distance, as the mainstream. Even more confounding is the epithet of 'middle cinema' – an obvious euphemism for middlebrow – bestowed in India upon movies that are not quite art house and not quite mainstream.
And how do we contend with that elephant in the room: Bollywood. The term has often been used as a pejorative in the past, suggesting a cheap derivative of Hollywood (one is reminded of 'impressionists', which was initially a term of abuse, but was later assimilated). There are still some within the Hindi film industry who take umbrage at the term, and maybe for good reason, given that Bollywood itself has diversified over the years, for better or for worse.

Anurag Kashyap in a 2012 interview said that in recent years it's the "mainstream that's being redefined".

Now, within this complicated mess – this labyrinth of signposts directing us exactly nowhere – we still have to somehow account for that niche category of filmmaking identified the world over as 'independent'. In the simplest of terms, independent filmmaking is an attempt to break the monopoly of major studios which largely maintain a stranglehold on the creative freedoms of writers and directors. But we must remember that most independent filmmakers still depend on big studios for the distribution of their films, implying that the break from the mainstream hasn't been as definite as one would like to assume. In this attempt to understand contemporary Indian cinema, I am beginning with the credo that categorising art can amount to simplifying it. So when I use the term 'independent' in the passages that follow, I use it, for valid reasons, loosely.
I spoke to filmmakers who straddle the divide between independent cinema and Bollywood, as well as to those who are now attempting to carve a niche for themselves within a more resolutely independent space of filmmaking, setting themselves in opposition to the mainstream and everything it stands for.
Without a doubt, we are witnessing an unprecedented boom in independent filmmaking in India. A number of annual film festivals, dedicated to screening independent films, have opened in the last decade. Films like Ship of Theseus and Court, to take a few recent examples, have received worldwide acclaim and prominent international screenings at the Toronto and Venice film festivals respectively. The box office success of The Lunchbox – a low-budget film made by Ritesh Batra, which according to reports, had grossed INR 160 crores globally by Dec 2014 – has broken the myth that independent cinema's box-office aspirations are unfounded.
Anurag Kashyap, seen as a modern-day auteur, has contributed in no small measure towards altering the very landscape of Indian cinema and furthering the cause of independent filmmaking with his genre-defying films like Dev.D and That Girl in Yellow Boots. Yet, at the same time, Kashyap has become the darling of the mainstream film industry.
"Why you hated me?" was one of the questions Karan Johar asked Kashyap on his primetime chat show Koffee With Karan, early in 2014.
Kashyap showed some signs of embarrassment, looked towards the ceiling, put a finger on his lips, and joked about his irritation at Johar bagging every mainstream award for Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998 (The film Satya, which was co-written by Kashyap, was also in the running that same year). Then he explained more seriously: "I think at that time I had this big resentment towards everything that was mainstream and I was also more idealistic. I was extremely judgemental of people… You to me were the, like oh, these rich kids from, who have struggled," he laughed, "in Malabar Hill."
There's a moment of general merriment. And then Johar: "Toh anyway, all's good in the hood now."
Johar was once synonymous with the 'gloss and syrup' (to borrow Amit Chaudhuri's phrase) style of Bollywood filmmaking, and in 2013 he partnered with Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar and Dibakar Banerjee for an anthology of short films called Bombay Talkies. Now this can either be read as the mainstream's new, evolved and mature avatar or can simply, and more cynically, be viewed as Bollywood chieftains wanting a slice of the independent pie.
It's a commonly held view that the American independent film movement of the 90s was thwarted, and its filmmakers absorbed, by Hollywood. A 2001 documentary on this issue, made by the Public Broadcasting Service, posed a straightforward question to the viewers: "Has Hollywood swallowed up 'independent film'?" However, some have taken an optimistic view in this regard. In the context of Indian cinema, Anurag Kashyap in a 2012 interview said that in recent years it's the "mainstream that's being redefined", instead of identifying the independent film as an entity separate from the mainstream. So the impulse to cross over is embodied as much by the mainstream as it is by the independent pockets of filmmaking in India. Producer Kiran Rao's decision to help release the self-consciously erudite Ship of Theseus for Indian audiences in 2013 is only one of several examples of such an exchange.
Beyond the mainstream
Some Indian independent filmmakers are even beginning to see strategic value in such collaborations. Producer and director Hansal Mehta is as much a veteran of mainstream film and television as of independent cinema. His 2013 feature film Shahid (which was co-produced by Anurag Kashyap, Sunil Bohra and others) won two National Film Awards.
The film is centred on the life of a Mumbai-based human-rights lawyer, Shahid Azmi, who was assassinated in 2010. In the movie, the protagonist is accused of being a 'jihadi', is arrested, tortured, jailed and, after lengthy legal rigmaroles, is finally acquitted. Shahid then studies law and decides to defend other Muslim men falsely accused of colluding with terrorists under the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Films dealing with similar themes in the past have struggled for viewership, coming up against needless hurdles put forth by the state's censorship machinery, which continues to grind today. A salient example is Kashyap's own film on the 1993 Bombay blasts, Black Friday – first screened in 2004 – which was held back from release for two years.
Loading content, please wait...
Himal Southasian
www.himalmag.com