Hindi Cinema Essay

With master filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, Bengali cinema has had its own presence, producing some of the country’s best films. Has it become a thing of the past? Or, can the new generation of Bengali filmmakers strike back?

As Indian cinema celebrated its 100 years, attention, for a large part, was centred on Bombay, where Dadasaheb Phalke’s mythological Raja Harishchandra — the first full-length Indian film — was released in 1913. However, Calcutta, till 1911 the capital of British India, already had a nascent film industry in the 1900s and 1910s, and was at par with Bombay in the silent and first talkie eras — a history that is often forgotten. Over the years, Bengali cinema has had its own presence, producing some of the country’s best

New Theatres produced such iconic films as Debaki Bose’s Chandidas (1932) and the first talkie version of Devdas (1935) directed by Pramathes Barua with KL Saigal starring in the film’s Hindi version. New Theatres films which epitomised the Bengal cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, drew heavily on the works of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (Bengal’s best-selling popular novelist), established a degree of technical excellence, and also popularised the hitherto elitist Rabindra Sangeet, to establish the connotations of a ‘cultured’ entertainment which became Bengali cinema’s apparent marker. New Theatres and other Bengal studios of the era produced both Bengali and Hindi-Urdu films, often the same film in a double version to simultaneously cater the Bengali and ‘all-India’ markets. It allowed the Bengal studios to establish a greater ‘all-India’ presence, and compete with Bombay on the parameters of a ‘cultured’ Bengali cinema versus a commercialised one and hence a relatively low-brow Hindi