At the Film & Television Institute, the other day, I found myself doing what I increasingly do at places like that: To check the most recent films that students may have either downloaded or 'ripped'. Obviously, in return I would give whatever I had. This time my haul included almost 40 GB of Japanese film, including controversial Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono's Suicide Circle series. In turn, I passed on major films by China's Sixth Generation filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai, including his now famous Frozen, and So Close to Paradise (better known as The Girl from Vietnam).

Wang's official arrival in India was only last November, when the Kolkata International Film Festival awardedthe NETPAC Award. Long before that, he was well known among young filmmakers and cinephiles for his 2001 classic. Both filmmakers' reputations, along with existing hard-disk circuit classics Kim Ki-Duk and Jia Zhangke, were made well before they were seen on any official screens in India, by the kind of excited sharing and equally excited 'discovery' of new masters by film students across the country. On numerous occasions, as with Wang Xiaoshuai, it is only this kind of informal curation-as cinephiles play curators, post their recommendations online and share, share, share-that has led to festivals acquiring and screening films.

Earlier this year, on a bravura programming exercise at the newly refurbished Osian's festival at Delhi's Siri Fort and other venues, film scholar Kaushik Bhaumik juxtaposed Anurag Kashyap (the complete two-part Gangs Of Wasseypur) and Rituparno Ghosh's Chitrangada alongside a major retrospective of Japanese 'pink film', and then also showed some edgy Pasolini (Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom) to make an argument about film history that I think is completely new to film programming. To make the point still further, Osian's brought over the filmmaker Q (whose controversial Gandu has been making the informal circuit even though its official release in India is still nowhere in sight) along with his band Gandu Circus to Delhi's Blue Frog. Rounding it off, with a most unlikely origin of all this, was a major and full retrospective of avant garde master Mani Kaul.

It is fairly well known that there is a new energy in almost all languages of Indian cinema. What is startlingly, even mind-numbingly new is the global context within which our films now consciously set their work. And with it, what has enabled this new ecosystem to develop. It is arguable the new spaces of showing, which include numerous and ever-expanding informal areas, from art galleries to cafes, are preceded by what I can only call new circuits of curation, performance and exhibition bring together numerous live practices and installation art to help restructure and redefine our encounter with the moving image.

This could not have been envisaged even a decade ago, when someone like Mani Kaul was still struggling to make films in the face of rank state indifference, cripplingly low budgets and the impossibility of distribution. Today, Kaul's student Gurvinder Singh, who dedicates to Kaul his extraordinary debut, a Punjabi film showing 24 hours in the life of a village near Bhatinda, has found his film released by the National Film Development Corporation, and will be seen in its use of non-professional actors and its extraordinary sync soundtrack to be a worthy equivalent of Jia Zhangke's justly celebrated, set in the Three Gorges Dam.

Anyone can be a film buff now

To many, the major public face of this new cinema is Anurag Kashyap, as much in his capacity of filmmaker as that of producer. As things are, Kashyap is producing Q's next Tasher Desh in Bengali, Marathi filmmaker Sachin Kundalkar's Aiyya, and already has Bedabrata Pain's Chittagong out. He would have produced Kaul's own next film but that wasn't to be, with Kaul's sudden and tragic demise, so he is now producing a documentary on Kaul. For many, Kashyap's appropriation of this new space is something of an act of opportunism, an appropriation of a diverse set of practices by no means limited to his own priorities. To others, however, his selection of both people to support-Vikramaditya Motwane, to take just an instance-as well as films from diverse languages and contexts, remains a marker of how old-style film production can be now combined with a new curatorial instinct. Films like Kashyap's Mumbai Cutting, comprising eleven shorts by such names as Sudhir Mishra, Kundan Shah, Jahnu Barua and Rituparno Ghosh, bears some similarity to a film student 'curating' his hard disk, sharing stuff both with friends and with unknown fellow cinephiles online and, sometimes, extending it into a filmmaking practice.

Both styles are sufficiently well established for us to look back and see what kind of filmmaking and film history can emerge. There are discernible trends: for one, films are being watched and assembled. A hundred years of Indian cinema does not, it appears, any longer need a film archive; any film student's 1 TB disk can do.

It is less easy to define the kind of filmmaking practice emerging from all this, but there are enough straws in the wind to make some kind of informed sense of what's going on. Here are a few speculative suggestions. The emphasis on gritty realism is certainly in:is only the most recent in a long series of films that may well have started, in hindsight, with the Mumbai gangster movie of the 1980s and '90s. This is Realism Mark II, we may say, and it certainly replaces an entire legacy of post-Independence cinematic realisms. For one, it eliminates what used to be the key distinction central to earlier realisms-between country and city.is somewhere between the two, a mobile dystopic space at once the heart of Mumbai and Bihar.

Such realism relies on a completely new soundscape: At one level sync sound is in, but at another, the extent of sound manipulation is such that sync may be better comprehended through Sneha Khanwalkar's Sound Trippin' than through fidelity to location. Location sound, then, mediated through sampling to produce literally the exact sonic equivalent of nowhereland.

Haven't we seen it before?

You can't now conceive of today's filmmaking style without first understanding yesterday's: All film language has thickened, even curdled, into such a dense communicative idiom that you cannot unpack it in any simple way: you need to first 'get' a lexicon of a near-century old film practice. And so the remake genre: The Saheb Biwi aur Gangster genre, and the mode retro of Bollywood where you can't understand, say, Om Shanti Om, unless you know the '70s movie. Most interestingly, perhaps, for me, the way an entire substructure of cinematic memory undergirds new narratives. My most interesting example here has been Srijit Mukherjee's 2010 Bengali film Autograph, in which Prasenjit plays a movie superstar now acting in a fictional remake of Satyajit Ray's Nayak and reprising the covert knowledge of star-predecessor Uttam Kumar.

Much more than just a movie

A third trend within the gritty-realism movie is the characterisation structure: Drawn as much, I think, from gaming experience as from cinema itself. We don't yet have an Indian equivalent of, say, the Arkham games of Batman, but it is clear to me that this kind of cinema is straining at the leash, wanting to break out into a potentially interactive idiom. And so what we have is a relay of characters, and literal movement from character to character, as we weave through a story almost as though we had an X-Box console in our hands.

The last is almost the most interesting of the three, partly because what we now see is a narrative imperative to do something in India that is simply not supported by the economy: The disaster of the Ra-One game on Sony Playstation 3 being only one example. The need, in a Rajinikant movie like Robot, or Shah Rukh Khan's superhero ambitions, is to go beyond the cinema-to see the cinema indeed like a glass cage in which they are trapped-define a drive that is larger than even these stars: A drive to push Indian cinema into a space for which neither is the market ready nor the technology.

But then this in itself is not new to Indian cinema, which has often functioned withoutestablished market support, forcing a spectatorial alliance to do their bit to see films through. Now the only difference is spectatorship is appended to a brand new set of hard disks.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture & Society, and the author of Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema.