It’s official: India is the new Hollywood. In 2009, the country produced a total of 2961 films on celluloid, including a staggering 1288 feature films, far outstripping its American rivals.
Film is everywhere in India; in the most unlikely little shops, in buses, in doctors’ offices, and of course, in the huge cinemas that one finds in even the smallest towns. One such town is Sivakasi, in Tamil Nadu, south India, where I spent two months in 2009. Tamil cinema has been thriving since the 1990s and is now the third largest film industry in the country in terms of the number of movies it produces each year. There were two new films showing at the Sivakasi cinema each week, and the evenings we spent there were some of the most entertaining of my trip.
The first thing you must know about Indian films is they are often of a prodigious length. We went to see ‘Ayan’, a Tamil thriller written and directed by K.V. Anand, and it lasted for well over two hours. Its length apparently necessitated two intervals, resulting in a three and a half hour excursion. The films are so long generally because they are punctuated with song and dance routines – which, although enjoyable, contribute little to the plot – and because they cater to a taste for lengthy, and surprisingly violent, fight scenes (complete with comic ‘biff’ and ‘slam’ noises). Given that we had no idea what the characters were saying in ‘Ayan’ (it was unlikely that a provincial cinema would provide English subtitles) it was a fantastic film, and a great example of the variety that one should expect from Indian cinema: beautiful women dancing in the desert, a conspicuously evil drug-lord, family drama, angry mothers, police chases, brawls, an attractive hero, and even an unpleasant murder scene in which a character is slit open so that the bags of drugs in his stomach can be removed.
The focus, in Tamil films at least, tends to be on familial issues, centring on arranged marriages and love affairs, which meant that we were usually able to understand the plots of the movies that were played at the front of otherwise decrepit buses, often on loop for an interminable length of time. As we bounced along potholed roads, the jangly, high-pitched music would blare out, another angry father would start punching a wayward boy after his daughter, a mother would lament the behaviour of her children, and then they would all pull some amazing dance moves to lift the mood.
Yet Indian films are not only important for their entertainment value; many of them deal with problems in society that might otherwise be taboo. The problems caused by caste, for example, which can drive young lovers to suicide in order to avoid family disgrace and disownment. The perennial issue of poverty is also explored by Indian films like the superb ‘Salaam Bombay!’, (1988) which follows the lives of young thieves and prostitutes in Mumbai’s notorious red-light district.
But don’t just take my word for it: the large Indian community in England has meant that we now have more access than ever before to Indian films on DVD and their soundtracks (often the best part). So get watching – they might even have subtitles.
