ABSTRACT
Indian audiences were exposed to the new art of the projected motion picture in the same year as their British, American, and Russian counterparts with the premiere of the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe showings in Bombay in 1896. In 1912, Dadasaheb Phalke, influenced by European films such as The Life of Christ (1910), made the first Indian feature film Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra [1912]), a mythological film based on the character Harishchandra from the Hindu epics. On the one hand, Indian cinema during the first half of the twentieth century was directly influenced by Euro-American films, but, on the other hand, the dominance of Indian religious and mythological subjects reinforced a nationalist identity posited against British colonial values. The religious content of Indian cinema, however, was not simply anti-British. It also questioned the conservative and fundamentalist elements in Indian cultural traditions. This combination of factors made Indian cinema a unique manifestation of a modernist aesthetics. In particular, even after the end of the colonial rule in the subcontinent, Indian modernist cinema remained consistently inconsistent and inherently contradictory by combining diverse genres such as melodrama with Italian neo-realism and German expressionism to create a cinematic form that fused the popular and political – a combination that also influenced Indian-Parallel cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.
