At the fag end of the 19^th century the brothers Lumiere held the first public screening of film in the darkened basement of a Paris café. Their invention, the cinematograph was a camera, a projector and a printer rolled into one, and defying Louis Lumiere’s expectation that “cinema is an invention without a future”, it became the tool for a most potent art.

The moving pictures or the motion picture came to Bombay within a year of its invention, in 1896, when the Lumieres showed off their work at Bombay’s Watson Hotel. Soon after, Hiralal Sen in Calcutta and H.S. Bhatavdekar in Bombay began making films of the Lumiere kind. On show were everyday scenes from the streets of two of India’s busiest cities.

The first feature film to be made in India was the silent black and white epic of ‘Raja Harishchandra’, a popular figure of legend who is still upheld as a symbol of truthfulness. The film was made by Dadasaheb Phalke, the man who is credited as being the father of Indian cinema.

The first talkie was made in 1931, when sound swept through the fledgling movie industry. ‘Alam Ara’ was the first of the Indian talkies. With a soundtrack, films acquired a mass following. It suddenly became financially feasible to make movies and so it was that film production took off in regional centres around the country. The Bengalis, Tamilians and Telugu were first off the block, followed by filmmakers from Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Orissa. Colour came to Indian films with ‘Kisan Kanya’ in 1937.

With colour and sound, the motion picture had come of age and it didn’t take Indians very long to tap this form of popular entertainment for all its worth. Today the Indian film industry churns out a mammoth 800 films annually, give or take a few. A fourth of these come from the Bombay industry, which, after a take on its LA counterpart, is popularly referred to as ‘Bollywood’. While every region has its own film industry, those that predominate are the Tamilian, the Telugu, the Malayalam (a.k.a. Mollywood!) and the Bengali (a.k.a. Tollywood after the Calcutta locality, Tollygunge).

The standard fare churned out of the film factory is what is called the “masala film”. The formula these movies employ to tug at the filmgoer’s sentiments and purse strings consists of liberal doses of action and melodrama, and dances to numbers that are produced by a music industry that is dedicated to the sole purpose of providing these 800 films with at least 4800 songs. The sentiments vary from era to era depending on the public mood and the ‘big social problem’ of the times.

There used to be a distinct parallel cinema, distinguished from its mainstream cousin in content and style. The emotions were subtle, the themes delicate and marked by a seriousness of purpose. While the popular cinema encouraged the imitation of art in life (spurring countless youth to chase women on the streets, the day’s most popular song on their lips), this other cinema consciously tried to imitate life. But not many people would pay to watch the dreary bits of their lives on 70mm, and starved of funds, trying to tap the huge mass market, parallel cinema makers died out as a breed.

The best of Indian cinema today has picked up the values and concerns of the ‘art house movement’ and merged it with a song-dance format to create movies that are commercially viable as well as aesthetically sound. The worst… well, that’s high entertainment and calls for a complete suspension of belief for the duration of 90 minutes!