The myths, trials and triumphs of the Indian indie. A narrative report

Also read: “The impression is that filmmakers are rich people.” Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni answers our questions on what the Indian government is doing for independent cinema



28 year old Karan Gour is setting his second film in a fictional nation.

He has a pact with other filmmakers who will follow in his act and set

their films in this ‘country’ too. The idea came about when Gour was

spending time with a group of Indonesian and Singaporean independent

filmmakers he met at the Shanghai International Film Festival. They were

lost on the streets of Shanghai. No one understood the languages they

spoke, not even the address they read out, because their accents made it

unintelligible.

He thinks of it as building an imaginary nation for independent

filmmakers. “It’s a large piece of land that exists between the US and

the UK,” he says. “A First World country.” We’re at his one-bedroom flat

in Andheri, Mumbai. All that’s in it is a mattress, a wobbly table that’s

holding Gour’s Macbook Pro and the 2 chairs that we’re sitting on. Paint

peels off the walls. Gour is wearing a faded T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

He asks me for a cigarette.

“It doesn’t have any history or culture,” he says. “We’ll create it as we

go along.” He says he’ll begin building it, then other filmmakers will take

over. “I’ll define some things in this movie. Where a specific city area

ends. Things like that.” Another filmmaker will determine what lies around

that city. Yet another will decide what the people are like and “who

conquered what, back in the days… “. Gour’s nation might be in its

nascent stages but he is very excited at the prospect of having a place in

the world for independent cinema– even if imaginary.

There’s no phrase more bandied in the Indian film media today

than ‘independent cinema’. Or ‘indie’ cinema. The Indian indie. The

hindie. The last coinage, often credited to Toronto International Film

Festival (TIFF) Artistic Director Cameron Bailey, refers to relatively

small budget, offbeat Hindi feature films, with no big Bollywood stars.

But Indian independent cinema could mean much more. It could mean

shorts, documentaries and of course alternative films in regional Indian

languages.

The focus here, however, is to look into Hindi, or English, or Hindi and

English feature films that aspire to provide a counterpoint to standard

Bollywood fare.

Here too the lines could blur. This Indian indie could be one of the 11

films, made on shoestring budgets, with barely recognizable actors,

and granted limited releases this year in an initiative, launched by one

of the country’s leading multiplex chains, called PVR Director’s Rare. Or

it could mean six off-beat films, with budgets higher than these but

lower than Bollywood blockbusters, mostly without stars, which have

seen mainstream releases this year, and critical as well as commercial

success.

One of the latter films is Gangs Of Wasseypur (GOW). While Guneet

Monga, one of its producers, calls it an independent film Manoj Bajpai,

who plays a key role in it, says in the Times Of India: “While Black Friday

and Paanch by Anurag (Kashyap – the director) were independent films,

GOW falls under the category of ‘new wave Indian cinema’.” As if defining

one new phrase wasn’t hard enough.

The Western definition of independent cinema is, simply, the films

produced mostly, or entirely, outside the six major US studios:

Paramount, Warner Bros., Walt Disney/Touchstone, Columbia, Universal

and 20th Century Fox.

In India independent cinema, like everything else, is harder to define.

The studio system crumbled in the fifties. A system of stars and formulae

emerged in its place which guarantees, in most cases, that a film will

command a decent profitability. The best way to define the Indian indie

is to say that it seeks to be independent of this system. It does not aim

to make a movie that appeals to the maximum number for the maximum

profit. It aims to sustain.

This isn’t new. Hindi movie watchers had an ‘art’ cinema, way back in

the 1940s, with filmmakers like V Shantaram and Chetan Anand. And

a ‘parallel’ cinema after that, with filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Govind

Nihalani and Saeed Mirza. “We disliked the term ‘parallel’ because it

seemed to assume that mass audiences would dislike our films,” says

Shyam Benegal. “But today you see Bollywood being influenced by Indian

off-beat films and trying to break out of its own formulae. This was

unheard of in our times. Perhaps that’s why– ‘parallel’.”

The Hindi independent cinema made today sets itself apart from the

parallel movement of the 70’s in more than one way. Its abbreviation of

‘hindie’ is an attempted infusion of coolth. It signifies a wider audience

that its makers see for it as compared to that of its predecessors,

generated by the proliferation of multiplexes and the internet. This

audience is mostly young and either exposed to world trends, or aspiring

to be. And there is a greater distinction. India’s art and parallel cinema

subscribed to a left leaning socio-political world view, however subtly

contextualized, and was often influenced by the new cinema being

made in Europe at the time. The hindie, subject to a wider and more

contemporary range of cinematic influences, prides itself on being

independent of political and moral obligations.

Some filmmakers would prefer to narrow this definition of independent

cinema down to the money it is made with. They would say an indie

has to be made cheap with money from sources who are removed from

the network of financiers and producers who fund Bollywood. But this trounces any hope of independent cinema evolving into a self-sustaining economy. Even in countries like the US, where the indie movement clearly avoids the major studios, an independent film like Sex, Lies, and Videotape had to be produced by a Robert F. Newmeyer (who was Vice President at Columbia Pictures before this), before it ushered in the cinematic revolution ascribed to it. In India, while independent films have been funded through crowdfunding or investors who’ve never invested in a film before – often the filmmakers themselves or their friends and family, we also have stories of a UTV financing Dibakar Banerjee’s no-star, small-budget debut Khosla Ka Ghosla. Or of a Bohra Brothers, which has spent half a century making mainstream Hindi movies, backing Hansal Mehta’s Shahid or Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan.

The apparent flourishing of Indian independent cinema in the last five

years has been put down to the rise or resurrection of institutions

that have broken existing rules, and laid out new ones. While this is

heartening, there is much to be done, and much to be watched out for.

While more exciting Indian independent films seem to be coming to the

fore today than earlier only a few actually push the envelope and make

for excellent cinema. Fewer find the distribution and exhibition outlets

they deserve. And some of the institutions spearheading this change

may just be discarding one set of formulae only to instill in their place

another.