The Golden Age of Hindi Cinema

Reference library · 991 words

The phrase golden age is applied loosely in film history, but in the case of Hindi cinema it points at something specific: a period running roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1960s in which Bombay's film industry produced work that was commercially enormous, musically extraordinary and, unusually for a popular cinema, seriously engaged with the political questions of a country that had just been created. It was not a movement with a manifesto. It was a coincidence of talent, of a new nation's optimism and unease, and of an industrial structure that briefly rewarded ambition.

What made the moment

Two disruptions set it up. The first was Partition in 1947, which tore the industry's personnel and its audience along a new border, sent Lahore's film community south to Bombay, and left a generation of writers and performers with direct experience of displacement. The second was the collapse of the old studio system. Before the war, companies such as Bombay Talkies, Prabhat and Ranjit kept actors, technicians and directors on salary. Wartime money, and the black market capital that followed it, made independent production more attractive, and by the early 1950s the salaried studio had largely given way to the freelance star and the one film financier.

That change is usually described as a loss, and creatively it was, but it also let a handful of director producers build small permanent teams of their own. Raj Kapoor's R.K. Films, Mehboob Khan's studio, Bimal Roy Productions and Guru Dutt Films each functioned as a private repertory company, with the same cinematographer, composer and lyricist recurring film after film. Continuity of that kind is what produced house styles distinctive enough to recognise within a shot.

The other ingredient was the left. Many of the era's writers came through the Progressive Writers' Association and the Indian People's Theatre Association, and they brought a habit of treating the poor as protagonists rather than as comic relief. Balraj Sahni, Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi, Shailendra and Salil Chowdhury all had roots in that world. Their instincts collided productively with the commercial demand for spectacle and songs, and the collision, rather than either impulse alone, is what the golden age sounds like.

The films

Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953) is the clearest bridge to Italian neorealism, which Roy had absorbed after seeing Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves; it follows a Bengali farmer who goes to Calcutta to pull a rickshaw and save his two acres of land, and it won a prize at Cannes. Roy went on to make Devdas (1955), with Dilip Kumar as the self destroying lover, and Madhumati (1958), a reincarnation ghost story that proved the same director could be commercial without embarrassment.

Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957), with Nargis as a peasant woman who endures flood, debt and the loss of her sons, was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film. It is simultaneously a nation building allegory and a melodrama of maternal sacrifice, and arguments continue over whether its politics are progressive or profoundly conservative. Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955) built a tramp persona openly indebted to Chaplin, wrapped around a debate about whether criminality is inherited or produced by circumstance. Awaara became a phenomenon in the Soviet Union, China and the Middle East, and its title song was for decades among the most widely recognised pieces of Indian music outside India.

Guru Dutt supplies the era's dark centre. Pyaasa (1957) follows a poet whose work is valued only once he is presumed dead, and ends with him walking away from the fame that arrives too late. Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), the first Indian film shot in CinemaScope, is a director's story of decline that failed badly on release and was reappraised only after Dutt's death in 1964. Both were photographed by V.K. Murthy, whose use of hard shafts of light through studio haze is the single most imitated visual idea of the period. Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962), directed by Abrar Alvi under Dutt's production, remains one of Hindi cinema's most acute portraits of a decaying feudal household.

At the opposite extreme of scale sits K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960), more than a decade in the making, an account of the Mughal prince Salim's forbidden love for the courtesan Anarkali, mounted with an extravagance that included a mirrored hall set and a celebrated sequence shot in colour within an otherwise black and white film. The Anarkali story itself is legend rather than documented history, a distinction the film cheerfully ignores.

The songs, and what ended it

No account of the period works without its music. Naushad brought Uttar Pradesh folk and light classical raga into film scoring, S.D. Burman drew on Bengali and north eastern folk, Shankar and Jaikishan built the lush orchestral sound of the Kapoor films, and Madan Mohan, C. Ramchandra, Roshan and O.P. Nayyar each held a distinct territory. Lyrics were written by poets who were poets first, which is why lines from Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool are still quoted independently of their films. The playback singers Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Manna Dey, Talat Mahmood and Geeta Dutt gave the era its voices.

What closed the period is disputed. The conventional account points to the deaths of Guru Dutt in 1964 and, later, of key composers and lyricists, to the loss of Nehruvian confidence after the 1962 war with China, and to the rise of colour spectacle and the romantic thriller in the mid 1960s. A less sentimental account notes that the golden age was always a minority of output, that formula films vastly outnumbered masterpieces at the time, and that the label was applied retrospectively by critics with the benefit of forgetting. Both readings can be held at once. What is not in dispute is that a small number of films made in Bombay in those fifteen years still define, for much of the world, what Indian cinema means.

Back to the library