I inaugurated this series on Bombay cinema two weeks ago. Last Sunday saw the first entry proper: an annotated list of 10 essential films from the 1950s. I was supposed to post the 1960s entry this week. However, all too predictably, I have not had the time to get to it. My term starts up on Monday and I’ve been going a bit out of my head getting ready for another 10 weeks of teaching over Zoom. But do not despair! I do have a 1960s list for you. It’s just not going to be annotated this week—I hope to get around to doing that by next Sunday. Wait, there’s more! One of the things I’ll be doing in this series on an ongoing basis—beyond the lists for each decade—is highlighting music in Bombay cinema. Today: a brief consideration of musical hybridity in 1950s and early 1960s films, and in particular, the adoption of swinging jazz and rock and roll. Continue reading →

[For the background on this series, see my introductory post from last Sunday.]

India became independent in 1947. The film industry—due to colonial censorship—had not been a significant cultural force in the anti-colonial movement (contrast with literature, especially in the high-Gandhian period from the 1920s on). In the first decade after independence, however, cinema was to become the major cultural form in which the new Indian nation was to be imagined and represented. Bombay was not the only location for this, of course. Bengali and Tamil cinema were already major industries, to name two; and it’s also worth remembering that before WW2 Bombay was not the only center of Hindi film production. With the Hindi film industry—and the nation—made over by Partition, however, by the end of the 1950s Bombay cinema’s ascendancy as the symbolic face of Indian cinema was complete. In this post I will briefly sketch some of the genres and thematic concerns that marked this decade, and highlight some of the major artists (directors, actors, music directors, singers, lyricists) who defined the era. At the end I will offer a few more general observations about Bombay cinema and also issue a couple of warnings for the unwary viewer. Continue reading →