The Quiet Innovations of Marathi Cinema

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Marathi cinema is usually introduced in Australia as a smaller neighbour of the Hindi film industry, a regional cinema with a modest budget and a devoted local audience. That framing gets the history backwards. The technical and institutional foundations of Indian film were laid largely by Marathi speakers working in Maharashtra, and for roughly three decades the most ambitious studio in the country was a Marathi enterprise. What looks from a distance like a regional offshoot is in fact one of the oldest continuous filmmaking traditions in Asia, and one that has repeatedly solved problems the larger industry only later confronted.

The starting point is Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, universally known as Dadasaheb Phalke, whose Raja Harishchandra of 1913 is generally described as the first Indian full length feature. The claim is not entirely uncontested: supporters of Dadasaheb Torne argue for his Shree Pundalik of 1912, and the dispute turns on definitions of what counts as an Indian production and what counts as a feature. It is worth saying plainly that the question has never been settled to everyone's satisfaction, and that both men worked in the same Marathi speaking milieu of Bombay and Kolhapur. Phalke's significance rests less on primacy than on method. He had trained in printing and photography, travelled to London to learn processing, and built his own equipment and effects. Indian cinema began as a craft problem solved by a technician, not as an import.

The Prabhat years and the studio idea

The decisive institution was the Prabhat Film Company, founded on 1 June 1929 in Kolhapur by V. Shantaram, Vishnupant Govind Damle, Keshav Rao Dhaiber, S. Fatelal and Sitaram Kulkarni. Prabhat moved to Pune in the mid 1930s, drawn by proximity to Bombay, and there built a studio whose discipline set a standard. Shantaram's Ayodhyecha Raja of 1932 was the first Marathi sound film, arriving a year after Hindi cinema's first talkie, and the studio then produced a run of pictures that combined devotional subject matter with unusually controlled camerawork.

The best known is Sant Tukaram, released in 1936 and directed by Damle and Fatelal, which was shown at Venice the following year and became the first Indian film to be recognised there. Its reputation rests on more than its award. The film treats the seventeenth century Varkari poet saint Tukaram not as a miracle worker but as a poor Deccan villager whose devotional abhangas emerge from domestic humiliation and hunger. The special effects are unfussy, the performances underplayed, and the songs are drawn from the actual Varkari repertoire rather than composed for the screen. That combination of documentary texture and religious subject matter is a Marathi signature that recurs for the next ninety years.

Prabhat also demonstrated something structurally important. Its founders were technicians and painters as much as directors: Fatelal and Damle came from art and craft backgrounds, and the studio treated set painting, sound recording and editing as skilled trades to be trained in house. When Shantaram left in 1942 to establish Rajkamal Kalamandir in Bombay, Prabhat declined, releasing its last significant film, Ram Shastri, in 1944 and closing formally in 1953. The premises did not go to waste. From 1960 they housed the Film and Television Institute of India, so that the country's principal film school inherited a Marathi studio's buildings and, arguably, its ethic of technical training.

A cinema of social argument

Shantaram's own career after Prabhat shows the second Marathi tendency, which is polemical. Do Aankhen Barah Haath of 1957 is a fable about prison reform in which a jailer takes six murderers to farm an abandoned field. Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje of 1955 was among the most colour conscious Indian films of its decade. These are message films, but they are staged with a formal seriousness that resists sentimentality, and they were made bilingually or remade across languages, a practice that kept Marathi production commercially viable.

Through the 1960s and 1970s Marathi cinema leaned on the tamasha tradition, the folk theatre form of Maharashtra with its lavani songs and its bawdy comic sequences, and on domestic comedy. This period is often dismissed as a decline. It is more accurate to say that the industry survived by binding itself tightly to live performance culture, which kept audiences and kept costs low, at the price of critical prestige.

The revival and what it changed

The turn came in the 2000s. Sandeep Sawant's Shwaas, released in 2004, concerns a grandfather bringing a child to Mumbai for eye surgery that will save his life but destroy his sight. It was selected as India's submission to the Academy Awards, the first Marathi film chosen, and its success prompted state subsidy and multiplex screening quotas in Maharashtra that materially changed production economics.

What followed was a decade of work that used those conditions well. Paresh Mokashi's Harishchandrachi Factory of 2009 dramatises Phalke's struggle to make Raja Harishchandra, a film about the founding of Indian cinema made in the language of its founders. Chaitanya Tamhane's Court of 2014 follows a sedition prosecution against an ageing protest singer through the tedium of a Mumbai sessions court, shot largely in long static takes with non professional actors and mixing Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English as the courtroom actually does. Nagraj Manjule's Sairat of 2016 begins as a rural romance and ends in caste violence, and became the first Marathi film to take more than a hundred crore rupees worldwide.

The through line is not style, since Court and Sairat could hardly look less alike. It is a willingness to build films around the specific social texture of Maharashtra: caste in the sugar belt, the Varkari pilgrimage, the machinery of a lower court, the economics of a village well. Marathi cinema has rarely had the budget for spectacle. Its innovations have been quieter, and mostly consist of taking ordinary Indian life seriously enough to film it without decoration.

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