The Parallel Cinema Movement and Its Quiet Rebellion

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Parallel cinema is the name given to a loose body of Indian film making that ran alongside the commercial industry from roughly the late 1960s to the late 1980s, made films without songs or with songs used ironically, cast unglamorous actors, shot on location, and expected an audience to sit with silence. It was never a single movement with a shared programme, and several of the film makers grouped under the label disliked it. But it was a genuine rupture, and its effects on Indian acting, screenwriting and the idea of what a film could be about are still visible.

Where it came from

Two institutions made it possible. The first was the Film and Television Institute of India at Pune, established at the start of the 1960s on the old Prabhat studio lot, which trained a generation in a curriculum built around world cinema rather than around Bombay convention. Ritwik Ghatak taught there and shaped students far more than his own frustrated career suggested he would. The second was the Film Finance Corporation, created by the government at the end of the 1950s to lend to producers who could not raise commercial money, and reorganised in the mid 1970s as the National Film Development Corporation. Low interest state loans, made for films with no star and no song, are the reason this cinema exists.

The intellectual precedent was Bengali. Satyajit Ray had demonstrated that a serious, quiet, location shot Indian film could find an audience abroad and, in Bengal, at home. Ritwik Ghatak had demonstrated something harder to imitate, that formal extremity and political rage could coexist inside melodrama. Mrinal Sen provided the direct trigger: his Bhuvan Shome, released in 1969, made on a small government loan, comic, casually experimental and commercially viable, is conventionally treated as the starting gun. The same year saw Mani Kaul's Uski Roti and Basu Chatterjee's Sara Akash, and critics began writing about a new Indian cinema.

Two temperaments

The movement split almost immediately along a line that its participants argued about for twenty years. On one side stood a rigorous, anti narrative tendency represented by Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, both FTII graduates and both taught by Ghatak. Kaul's films, including Uski Roti and Duvidha, adapted from a Rajasthani folk tale, treat duration, silence and the surface of the image as the subject; Shahani's Maya Darpan is built on colour and stillness rather than incident. This work was made for festivals and film societies and made no pretence otherwise.

On the other side stood a socially engaged realism that wanted an audience. Shyam Benegal's Ankur in 1974, about a landlord's son and a servant woman in rural Telangana, was made cheaply and returned its money. Nishant followed in 1975 and Manthan in 1976, the latter about the dairy cooperative movement and notable for being financed through contributions from the farmers of the cooperative itself, who then turned up to watch it. Bhumika in 1977, drawn from the life of a Marathi actress, gave Smita Patil one of her defining roles. Govind Nihalani, who had photographed Benegal's early films, directed Aakrosh in 1980 about a tribal man who will not speak in his own defence, and Ardh Satya in 1983, a police drama with Om Puri that is probably the most widely seen film of the whole movement.

Around them worked Saeed Akhtar Mirza, whose Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai examined the political education of a young Catholic mechanic in Bombay, Ketan Mehta, whose Bhavni Bhavai and Mirch Masala used folk theatre forms rather than realism, and Aparna Sen, whose 36 Chowringhee Lane in 1981 followed an ageing Anglo Indian schoolteacher in Calcutta. In Kerala and Karnataka the parallel wave was funded partly by state governments, producing the sustained careers of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan and Girish Kasaravalli.

The actors, and the ending

The movement's most durable legacy is a school of performance. Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi and Amrish Puri, most of them trained at the National School of Drama or FTII, brought an interiority that Hindi film acting had rarely permitted. Several of them moved between parallel and commercial work throughout their careers, which quietly undermines the idea that the two cinemas were sealed off from each other. Amrish Puri became one of Hindi cinema's great villains; Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil appeared in mainstream productions between art films, sometimes to fund them.

Television extended the movement's life in the 1980s. Doordarshan, then the only broadcaster, commissioned serials and telefilms from the same directors, including Benegal's ambitious historical series based on Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India. For a period the audience for this work was larger on television than it had ever been in cinemas.

Its decline had less to do with taste than with distribution. NFDC funded films were made but frequently not released, because single screen exhibitors saw no reason to book a film without stars or songs. Video piracy hollowed out the small town market. State subsidies were cut or captured, and in some states the subsidy produced films made only to claim it. By the early 1990s the pipeline had largely dried up.

Its influence did not. The independent Indian films that have circulated internationally since the 2000s, and a good deal of the writing and casting in mainstream Hindi cinema, descend directly from it. Whether the label parallel cinema was ever accurate remains contested: the film makers involved ranged from austere formalists to commercially minded realists, and grouping them together tells you more about how critics organise history than about what was actually being made.

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