Celebrating the extraordinary artists who have paved the way for South Asian Cinema in the UK, Suman Buchar and Lalit Mohan Joshi were in conversation for Manch UK’s online series ‘Cinemawallahs’ where they discussed Joshi’s foray into his work on popular Indian cinema in the UK and how the perception of Indian cinema has changed in England over the years.
Writer, Journalist, Documentary Filmmaker & Film Historian. Former BBC World Service Producer & Founder Director/ Editor, SACF, London, Lalit Mohan Joshi’s foray into Indian cinema started when he was a school boy. “I have seen maximum films from sixth standard to High School. Not after that. So my knowledge was rooted into those times when I used to bunk classes with three friends and used to go to watch films on a bicycle. Sometimes we used to watch films in the front row seats which cost 50 paise (approximately £0.50) in those days. When the interval used to happen, we used to dunk so that nobody could see us because it could hurt our pride. We belonged to good families (where in those days watching films was not looked up to),” said Joshi, whose roots are in Lucknow and Allahabad.
Joshi worked on a popular BBC series which was recorded in 19 parts for BBC Hindi. It was a collection of interviews with 20 Indian filmmakers on the history of Indian cinema which was broadcast across all channels of the BBC in those days. That’s how Joshi’s contribution to popular Indian cinema in the UK made waves.
South Asian Cinema Foundation (SACF) was set up by four founders - Lalit Mohan Joshi, his wife Kusum Pant Joshi, Derek Malcolm and PK Nair (Lalit’s guru) set up the foundation at a Pizza Restaurant in Westend. Joshi argued that nobody knew how widespread Indian cinema was. He shared the backstory of how SACF was set up and most importantly, why. He said, “The main reason was my continued contribution to exploration of Indian cinema, I realised that although I was not in India, I think that made my position even more important because I came to do something that nobody else was doing. But I was thinking about doing something which will be unique and will sort of bring in filmmakers who have not been brought in. Nobody had ever brought MS Sathyu who had made a seminal partition film called Garam Hawa (1974). Nobody had brought Girish Kasaravalli who is from Karnataka or Adoor Gopalakrishnan. I used to talk to Derek Malcolm (English film critic and historian) who used to say that the impression of Indian cinema with snooty people like us is “Ray or Rubbish”. So either it was Satyajit Ray, or everything else Bollywood was rubbish. I used to think that there’s a huge gap where I can come. And that became the seed for South Asian Cinema Foundation (SACF).”
Did he feel they needed promotion as popular filmmakers? Joshi told Buchar, “My motivation was the hurt that I used to receive from even my friends like Derek Malcolm and many many snobbish people in Britain who used to say that Indian cinema is crap because it’s all running around the trees. And I thought how can we think like that! Ray is not the only filmmaker that we have produced. We’ve had so many sensitive filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and many more. So I thought that it was my duty to introduce the real Indian cinema to the audiences in London, as well as to so called academics and everybody that this was the depth of Indian cinema, because regional cinema is the kind of cinema where lies the power of Indian films because they represent the real India. I may not have succeeded in making those filmmakers popular here, but we did introduce them.”
Joshi says that since he set up SACF in the year 2000, the perception of Indian cinema has changed. “There are so many new filmmakers that have come up. They say Indian cinema has dried up, now there are no songs in Indian cinema, only numbers, which is not true. Indian cinema still is inspiring. Even filmmakers after Anurag Kashyap, there’s a whole generation. There are so many regional filmmakers. If we have sensible projects, we will train people and they will know about Indian cinema,” he said.
Book Recommendation: Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema by Lalit Mohan Joshi
Written by Gulzar, Shyam Benegal, Lalit Mohan Joshi, among many other experts on the Industry, Bollywood, Popular Indian Cinema is the ultimate guide to the most popular of Indian cinema. A gripping analysis of the last 100 years is provided by the book’s editor, Lalit Mohan Joshi. It covers the long Indian film history including rarely seen images from film archives together with those by leading photographers. This is the one book that every Hindi movie lover should own. It celebrates what is now a far-reaching and world-renowned cultural phenomenon with 400 pages of the most spectacular photographs, the stories of the stars who make the films, in-depth stories of every great Hindi film and its context, unmatched production quality and brilliant writing. Lalit Mohan Joshi does not advocate the word Bollywood and he rather wishes to address Indian films as “Popular Indian Cinema”. When it came to locking the title of the book, his ideology did not match with the editor's choice (which was Bollywood). So the two decided to use both the terms as a collective title of the book. You can purchase it from Amazon.
