Did you know that the humble harmonium, that simple, mellifluous, wooden casket of music, was once banned by state-owned All India Radio? Hark back to 1940, and one learn that the ban was promulgated as "its tempered scale, adapted from the organ, is (was) considered antithetical to the shruti or microtones that give Indian music its continuous scale." This was the same year that the All India Muslim League adopted the 'Pakistan Resolution' at Lahore as also when Devika Rani took over Bombay Talkies. Cut ahead to 1979 and one gleans that this year was the only occasion when the film industry attempted to start a political party of its own -the 'National Party' with a predominantly pro-industry rightwing manifesto.
Politics and films? Yes. Tracing the roots of Indian cinema since 1896 when India saw its first screening of a film at Watson's hotel, Bombay, by Lumiere cameraman Maurius Sestier, this encyclopaedia weaves with elan the political, social and 'filmy' happenings. Completely revised and updated, the book (this being the second edition), with 400 new entries on films and individuals, is the most comprehensive guide to Indian cinema ever produced. It covers every film-producing region and all the major languages, and has entries on individual stars, directors, studios, genres and movements.
Each film entry includes cast and credit details and concise and often challenging evaluations. With more than 1,700 entries, the encyclopaedia spans over a hundred years of the world's biggest and most diverse film industry. The book's indices, filmographies and film entries have now been updated till 1995. There are entries on actors, filmmakers and composers who have made their mark in the 1990s, and a vastly expanded section of film entries wherein covering mainstream productions from the 1970s to the 1990s. One of the new features includes an exhaustive index of names other than the ones featuring as independent entries. The cross-indexing of films, actors, filmmakers, film companies and other film personalities makes this section a clincher.
Talking about the scope of the encyclopaedia, co-author Paul Willemen of the British Film Institute writes in the preface: "India has been taken here not as a fixed entity, but as a socio-cultural process, a changing and contested set of overlapping frameworks (always temporarily) stabilised by governmental institutions, be they the colonial administration, the Indian government or the various institutions seeking to regulate (or deregulate, which is only a different type of regulation) the interface between culture and economy within, at any given time, specific territorial limits. In the end, our main guideline has been to focus on the works, the artists and the institutions which have addressed Indian cinema as a constituent part of India as a sociocultural process."
All that is fine. But read between the lines and you will realise what, as one major contributing factor, has sounded the death knell of the so-called New Indian Cinema. The compendium accords too much space and, perforce, too much importance to ephemeral stars of mainstream, narrative cinema who have had little or nothing to contribute to the cinema that has brought respect and, at times, awe the world over. The Indian media's obsession with pulp films mid-80s onwards hammered one nail after the other into the coffin of good cinema. This book willy-nilly (more, nilly perhaps) writes its epitaph in print, and for good.
All said, done, and forgiven, there can be no better collection of facts and figures on Indian films as a whole as this one. The grouse against the yielding too much significance to inconsequential, mundane and cliché-ridden cinema notwithstanding, this book is worth a buy.
