Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking?

Abstract

Poet and polymath A. K. Ramanujan once wrote a serious article that he playfully titled, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" It began by querying its own question, for Ramanujan was aware of the risk of essentialism (and its past deployment by Orientalists, Marxists, nationalists, and so on) when approaching a vast region of perhaps greater ethnic and linguistic diversity than Europe.1 Yet as a trained linguist and folklorist, he was indeed interested in the recurring patterns and themes that lend a distinctive flavor to South Asian culture?a flavor that may be especially recognizable to an outsider, or to an insider who steps out. That Indian popular films likewise have a definite "flavor" is generally recognized (and one indigenous descriptor of them is indeed as mas?l? or "spicy"), even by Anglo Americans who encounter them while surfing cable TV channels?and not simply because the actors happen to be Indian. The films look, sound, and feel different in important ways, and a kind of cinematic culture shock may accompany a first prolonged exposure. An American film scholar, after viewing his first "mas?l? blockbuster," remarked to me that the various cinemas he had studied?American, French, Japanese, African?all seemed to play by a similar set of aesthetic rules, "but this is a different universe." Experienced viewers are familiar with the some times negative responses of neophyte visitors to this universe: the complaint that its films "all look the same," are mind-numbingly long, have incoherent plots and raucous music, belong to no known genre but appear to be a mish-mash of several, and are naive and crude imitations of "real" (that is, Hollywood) movies, and so on?all, by the way, complaints that are regularly voiced by some Indians as well, particularly by critics writing in English. They also know that millions of people, including vast audiences outside the subcontinent, apparently understand and love the "difference" of these films.