ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a profound transformation of Bengali regional-language
cinema since the early 1980s, a transformation that fundamentally changed
the industry and one that can arguably be attributed at least partly to the
creation of a Bengali television-watching public in the same period. It
focuses on a trend that emerged in mainstream Bengali cinema during the
1980s and was sustained thereafter, and brought into prominence a new
configuration of elements previously marginal to Bengali films. This trans-
formation was to do with mainstream Bengali cinema’s increasing adaptation of what are commonly known as the ‘‘masala’’ or ‘‘formula’’ elements
of Bombay cinema,1 such as racy dialogues, stereotypical villainous char-
acters, stylized fights and song-and-dance sequences. This new genre, which
has commonly been discredited as the Bengali film industry’s totally unim-
aginative imitation of the popular Hindi-language cinema of Bombay,
completely altered what had been the dominant aesthetic of Bengali cinema
till about the mid-1970s. Until this point, Bengali cinema was marked by its
close relationship with Bengali literature and a Bengali middle-class worldview, greater realism than Bombay cinema or other mainstream regional
cinemas, and naturalistic acting styles, and was radically transformed by a
growing adoption of the ‘‘formula’’ elements commonly identified with
popular Hindi cinema. Industry sources, however, indicate that this new
trend was successful in boosting the Bengali film industry, which had been
swamped by a severe economic crisis since the 1970s. The industry’s crisis
was caused by a host of factors: the most important of these was the Ben-
gali middle-class audience’s shift to television as a result of an increasingly unsatisfactory film-going experience in this period. The creation of a Ben-
gali television public in the early 1980s shifted audiences from the cinema
theatres, thereby significantly reducing film revenues in Calcutta,2 until then
the prime market for Bengali films.3
