Our nation has somehow, before our post-independence eyes, invented the most successful form of entertainment ever devised by humanity – by sheer number of viewers that is. Feature films are the great popular passion of India, cutting across all social divides of caste, class, gender, region, religion and language. They absorbed all other performing arts from here and abroad, and churned. Urdu and Tamil, poets, scriptwriters; Carnatic ragas, blues and jazz and folk; and churned. The Indian film industry absorbed Parsis, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Christians, Sikhs, and churned. It absorbed Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Assamese, Odiya, so many others, and churned. And all our gods and demons out of the sea have made an extraordinary masala by their churning. This filmi nectar is an ambrosia so intoxicating, that it has achieved what no Indian politician has ever done, could ever dream of. In our cinema, the bad guys always come to no good.Indian cinema doesn’t have a nuclear bomb, it never suffers a recession. How easily it is dismissed as – and here’s a word I just hate using – ‘Bollywood’. Degenerate, trivial, trashy, flashy hocus-pocus. Because, ‘you see the whole country of this system is juxtaposition by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity’. Trashy hocus-pocus!Our post-independence cinema played centre-stage creating Nehru’s vision of India, where both cinema, elitism and populism produced a new sense of distinction and a collective imagination. What it does... is that it unites an entire people. And it goes beyond that – our cinema respects no national borders. It unites peoples.

Perhaps I too may have missed a point in the past when bored watching an Indian film, I felt the absurdity of seemingly dislocated elements and then suddenly flew into a rage – why? What on earth is this song about? What does it have to do with the plot? What’s it doing here now? But as I reconsider what I see... I have to ask myself that whether, counter-intuitively, it’s about something wiser. Perhaps it is wiser than the director, the screenwriter, the actor and the audience. We all know how Indian epic narrative is interspersed with non-narrative spectacular episodic song. But what about this – it most extraordinarily mirrors our two-fold tradition in ancient Hindu scripture – of smriti, that of remembered, and sruti, that which is revealed. Smriti, the epic narrative tradition of our sacred texts, now speaks to us anew in our overblown film plots. That which is remembered, re-echoed again from memory into recognisable voices. And then the sudden bursts of intermission – non-narrative songs from nowhere. Yes, they are moments of pure sruti.A successful film director of the 70s once said, ‘I want people to forget their misery. I want to take them into a dream world where there is no poverty, where fate is kind and God is busy looking after his flock.’ But why do we presume that it is only through daily suffering that we come to understand these truths? This is what most of us really think, isn’t it? Why? What really are we doing when we call our cinema escapist and mere fantasy? I suspect our modern affair with realism is like any other ism – just another overcompensation of ideology. Why exactly does the real, just as confected as any other idea of ours, embody more truth about the human condition than the ideal? Particularly when these very realistic films are being made by perfectly unfamished, middle-class Indians? Why is suffering more real than joy or pleasure? Isn’t this a rather puritanical, reified, literalist and simplistic position? Isn’t it a bit self-indulgent of us from our position of comfort? Isn’t it ultimately offensive towards those that suffer? Why won’t we more hear them speak for themselves?Transcribed by Chandna Arora