To discuss the challenges of working around Indian cinema before it became Bollywood, Manch UK’s virtual event presented a panel which was curated and chaired by Rosie Thomas, Professor of Film at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, along with panelists: author and screenwriter Farrukh Dhondy, filmmaker and researcher Behroze Gandhy filmmaker, and filmmaker Pervaiz Khan.
“On a wet Sunday morning of November 1949, a trickle of people, some Indians in their sarees, providing a sudden splash of colour, in the grey of London’s Bakers Street and some English, could be seen making their way to the classic cinema to see an Indian feature film. It was touch and go whether the handful of India league members responsible for founding the India film society would be able to make a success of this first show. Some considered that they would never be able to get people out of bed early on a grey Sunday morning to see an Indian film, particularly one without English subtitles. But the pessimists fortunately were proved to be wrong. The first members of the society came for classic cinema from all over London and beyond, and ‘Kismat’ starring the hot favourite Ashok Kumar and Mumtaz proved to be an instant success. So the India league which was responsible for all these efforts was formed in 1930 by Krishna Menon, later to become the first High Commissioner of India to Britain. It was literally the overseas branch of the Indian National Congress which was trying to activate a cultural movement in Britain as propaganda for the Indian independence movement,” Gandhy quoted author Pamela Cullen.
Rosie Thomas called the session an attempt to “explore and excavate an era” while discussing the films of the 80s and 90s with a bit of a peak into the 1970s. In those days, ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ was screened on a Saturday morning without the songs because it was assumed that the British audience wouldn’t be interested in the songs. During that time in academia, Rosie said that Indian cinema was scarcely on any syllabus. “I had the memory of one Hindi film I had seen in Jaipur that never left me so I decided I’ll go to Bombay (now Mumbai) and study the Hindi film industry, which was met with horror by my professors who said, “You can’t study cinema. Cinema isn’t culture.” Nowadays every second anthropologist is studying visual culture,” Rosie said.
Producer Behroze Gandhy explained that in 1979, the immigrants arrived from India, Pakistan and East Africa, and continued to import their culture from the mother country. The west did not satisfy their need for entertainment. She said, “Television soon paled and the pubs and discotheques did not lure them due to rigid orthodoxy. Hence, Indian cinema had no rival as a source of entertainment in the entire Asian community in Britain. In the 50s there was only one cinema showing films on Sundays only. Today there are nearly 200 centres showing Indian films throughout the country. And that is the whole story of how these competing film societies mushroomed all over the country.”
Screenwriter Farrukh Dhondy shared his experience of watching films in the early 70s and said, “When I came to study at Cambridge and it had no such theatres. We had to watch European cinema and develop a taste for it which was completely different. Having been brought up on Indian cinema, I couldn’t lose the addiction. It is a kind of addiction such that you got to hear songs and for God’ sake hear Lata Mangeshkar’s dripping with sex voice.”
Gandhy said, “We did a series on Hindi pictures at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The key films were Sholay, Mother India and Pakeezah. Channel 4 was one thing that made coming back to Britain palatable given its push under the Labour government in the 1970s.”
Parvaiz Khan said that he showed films of Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal in Birmingham as a youth worker. “I remember showing early documentaries by Anand Patwardhan, spread across the West Midlands. Community organisations would approach us. Funding has always been a challenge in the arts,” he said.
This is a time when a whole generation of British Asians was very young.
Behroze and Rosie were supposed to make a show for Parvaiz where they wanted a dramatic presenter. Behroze went to Shabana Azmi but ended up bringing filmmaker Shekhar Kapur on board, who was shown a pilot on “Homosexuality in the Asian community”. “It ventured where Asians feared to tread,” said Dhondy. Their first programmes were based on ‘racism in the Indian community’ and ‘violence in Hindi cinema’.
