Abstract
Sudha Tiwari, The State and New Cinema in Contemporary India 1960–1997. New York: Routledge, 2024, 310 pp., ₹1595 (Hardback). ISBN: 9781032768342.
Sudha Tiwari’s work has arrived as a remarkable contribution to the discipline of cinema studies in India. A historian, her strenuous and meticulous research at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and elsewhere shows in a multimodal, multifaceted narrative of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) on one hand, and of the Indian state and its cultural policy after independence on the other. The two narratives run parallel, with Tiwari’s ambitious claim of reading culture as policy and policy as culture manifesting over the course of the monograph. The archival-historical turn that has marked Indian cinema studies for some time now is perhaps indicative of historians’ wider interest in the many accounts of Indian cinema, the other recent instance being Rochona Majumdar’s work on Indian art cinema history. It might also be noted that Indian cinema studies, since its advent as a university discipline, concerned itself primarily with the Bombay-based Hindi popular cinema, while the state-supported art cinema, also known as the Indian New Wave or New Cinema, of the pre-liberalisation era remained largely unaddressed. Majumdar and Tiwari’s works have helped the discipline in initiating sustained historical accounts of Indian cinema beyond the popular.
Not all the state agencies that contributed to the making of a state-sponsored cinema in India have been the subjects of historiography. Peter Sutoris and Ritika Kaushik’s works on the Films Division, Ramesh Kumar’s unpublished dissertation and scattered articles on the comparative histories of NFAI are significant instances, but there is no sustained engagement with the pedagogic history of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). No comprehensive history of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) exists either, even though there are film-anthropological accounts of the Indian censorship system. Before Tiwari’s work, neither historians nor film scholars had devoted their focus to the FFC or NFDC.
The Indian New Wave and its legacies have been addressed in the film society literature that predated cinema studies. This had its advantages and limitations. While this mode of writing offered information on the lived experiences of film society activists and indicated their politics of curation, the much-desired critical approach towards the relevant institutions of cinema was lacking. Pioneering works of cinema studies in India have occasionally analysed some aspects and versions of the New Cinema. Madhava Prasad’s ideological history of Bombay cinema, for example, explores the nuances of middle class cinema and the ‘developmental aesthetic’ (Prasad, 1998, pp. 160–216). However, Tiwari’s work not only presents the first comprehensive account of the state agencies that funded and contributed to the New Cinema in India but further offers economic, institutional and state-policy histories of Indian art cinema through robust archival evidence. There have been arguments and discursive positions on art, middle and popular cinemas of the 1970s, but the archival support in Tiwari’s monograph opens up additional avenues of inquiry.
One of the most foundational aspects of Indian cinema studies literature is its insistence on the post-independence Indian state’s desire to produce a citizen with the cognitive abilities to support a cinema that could represent the new nation on a global festival circuit. The idea of a ‘statist’, presumably ‘realist’, cinema and the many possible threads connecting the citizen, the state and cinema have always been there. Tiwari’s book convincingly intervenes to argue that the state is not the only player here, as there have been multiple agencies, powerful interests and institutions involved. Hence, the New Cinema cannot be reduced to a state enterprise or political project.
Tiwari uses an enviable range of resources as evidence for destabilising an overtly statist framework for understanding the New Cinema, including the annual reports of the FFC, NFDC and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s, reports of the Committee on Public Undertakings (CPU), Film Enquiry Committee report of 1951, Sangeet Natak Akademi seminar documents of 1955, International Film Festival of India/Filmotsav documents, film magazines such as Filmfare and Screen, newspaper clippings and personal interviews with several filmmakers of the New Wave. She deploys cultural policy studies along with such traditional historical research methods as archival exploration in developing a nuanced framework for cine-institutional history writing.
The book, from its outset, addresses the desire for a new/art/internationally relevant cinema in post-independence India, on the part of state agencies as well as non-state actors and individuals. Then, it proceeds to trace the emergence of the FFC, the conflicting nature of the Indian state’s patronage (as manifested in its arbitrary decisions of supporting or not supporting specific films and in debates concerning the efficacy of granting loans and offering subsidies to filmmakers), and the FFC’s institutional role in realising a film movement and culture. An account of the National Emergency of 1975–1977 and the tumultuous years preceding it follows, foregrounding the impact of the Emergency on the FFC and the latter’s anticipated merger with the new and arguably more profit-oriented NFDC. This is followed by an account of the NFDC’s activities throughout the 1980s, the controversies around them, the advent of the state-owned Doordarshan television, and its collaboration with the NFDC that offered exhibition avenues and benefits for New Cinema. The decade that followed saw several cataclysmic events internally and internationally, and, with economic liberalisation, the NFDC faced an existential threat and had to reinvent itself. As Tiwari has shown, the necessity for a state agency such as NFDC was questioned and a possible disinvestment was prescribed at times, but the agency managed to survive through newer avenues of revenue generation (the DD Metro Channel, for instance).
Tiwari traces the apparent film-polemical metamorphosis of New Cinema into Parallel Cinema and finally into ‘independent/indie cinema’. Debates within the film world between the avant-garde and more accessible and ‘popular’ parallel cinema, over differences between industrial and creative practices, and over accusations made against NFDC policies feature strongly in Tiwari’s work with several interviews, newspaper reports and magazine reviews contributing to multifaceted narratives of New Cinema. The arbitrariness in NFDC’s production standards, dearth of relevant exhibition space and gradual emergence of a new mode of spectatorship with the advent of television appear as many parts of the story of state patronage and its decline. The history of the post-independence state runs alongside without overtaking the cine-political history. The age-old issue of cinema’s (or other cultural artefacts’) possible contribution to the political historical archive resurfaces.
Some inadvertent errors need to be rectified in the next edition of the book. There is a mention of Tapan Sinha’s Urmila (p. 176). The film is actually titled Adalat o Ekti Meye (1982), while Urmila (Tanuja) is the protagonist in it. There is also a reference to Raj Kapoor’s Henna (1991), but Kapoor died during the filming, and the film was completed by Randhir Kapoor, who is credited as the director (p. 231).
The national context of New Cinema that Tiwari explores surely does have far wider transnational aspects, which are marginally addressed. In contemporary cinema studies research, the global long 1960s in the domain of cine-politics has attracted considerable attention. The mediation of Europe, its soft power and diplomacy initiatives impacting the formation of art cinema discourse, its selective engagement with Global South New Waves, the politics of curation in the socialist world during the Cold War, the USSR’s Third World internationalism, the formation of a global socialist cinema and related issues appeared in the works of Rielle Navitski, Masha Salazkina, Rossen Djagalov and Daniel Fairfax. Many histories of the twentieth century in the West are often inseparable from their ‘cinematographic forms’ (de Baecque, 2012, p. 358), but their implications for the Global South have led recently to more nuanced explorations. Indian cinema studies need to respond to this call.
For this, we need to move gradually towards film aesthetics, with the meta-narratives of cine-political history providing the necessary support. In her chapter on economic reforms and the NFDC, Tiwari refers to films such as Mammo (Shyam Benegal, 1994), Naseem (Saeed Akhtar Mirza, 1995) and Char Adhyay (Kumar Shahani, 1997). While all three, as she rightly points out, critique the state and engage with many interpretations of nationalism, Shahani’s ambiguous, enigmatic, ellipsis-driven, disjointed reworking of Tagore (almost like the Tagore songs that start in medias res and end abruptly) stands in sharp contrast to the social realism of the others, marking the end of state patronage for his brand of avant-garde filmmaking.
But this is for the film aesthete to take over as she has already been provided with a veritable arsenal by a historian, for which all of us will remain indebted to this book.