Celebrating a century of Indian cinema: passions, pleasures and perceptions

Abstract

How does one celebrate the centenary of ‘a way of life’?

For a medium, you remember its greatest meaning makers. For a movement, you highlight the turning points in its journey. For an individual, the heights of success and impact. But what about an art form that started as an ‘alien’ wonder to end up not only as a way of life, but also a prodigious offspring, unimaginably mutated away from its now ‘foreign’ parent DNA, in a span of just 100 years. Today, it would not be an overstatement to celebrate Bollywood or popular Indian cinema in the national language, Hindi, as India’s most recognisable offering on the international culture platform. Its film industry is arguably one of ‘Shining India’s’ truly uncontested achievements in the new millennium. 

As a film critic I have frequently come across star, journalist and fan anecdotes of fond introductions and interactions over shared Bollywood memories in foreign lands. These stories have always evoked a sceptic’s enthusiasm, until recently, when a Russian man approached me on a bus in Edinburgh, hesitant yet excited, upon seeing a song sequence featuring Raj Kapoor playing on my laptop. Two decades ago, as a teen he had queued up with his grandmother for an umpteenth showcase of Brodigaya (the Russian name for Awara, which was dubbed and released in 1954) on a snowy winter’s afternoon in Moscow in the 1990s.  Nearly three decades after his death and six decades since the release of Awara (1951), Raj Kapoor had once again connected two strangers from two different nations, in a third foreign land. Raj Kapoor and Awara remain Indian cinema’s first major triumph with audiences beyond the Indian sub-continent. 

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