Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article presents an overview of early industrial conditions in Bengal, focuses on the major studios and draws attention to emergent genres and genre overlaps. While a study on New Theatres Ltd. (NT) shows how the establishment aspired to produce ‘respectable’ films, the research conducted on Sree Bharat Lakshmi Pictures (SBLP) shows how we might reconsider the themes, styles and concerns of ‘literary’ versus ‘popular’ cinema in Bengal. Arguing for the persistence of the popular in relation to what I describe as ‘literary’, the article refers back to NT films, discusses their formal explorations and underscores the circulation of a range of other generic elements within the Bengali public sphere. I particularly examine SBLP’s Abatar (d. Premankur Atorthy, 1941), which on one hand, could be seen as a loose adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Muktadhara (The Waterfall, 1922), and on the other hand, mixes diverse elements of futurist films, comedy, documentary, etc., with the mythology. By locating Abatar within cinema-modernity deliberations, the article analyses how it operates through multiple registers and generates a complex field of possibilities. Studying the ways in which Bengali cinema borrowed from heterogeneous cultures of literature, theatre and ‘the bazaar’, this article reads Bengali films, film cultures and the mode of ‘genre-mixing’.
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