Abstract
Long before Bollywood’s visibility, Indian art cinema was a corpus that emerged in the mid-1950s, in tandem with postwar European art cinema—a response to a domestic clamor for “better” cinema by a cosmopolitan class who shaped public discourse against the mainstream cinema industry. India’s 20th century internationally acclaimed master-auteur, Satyajit Ray’s films, aligned with Nehru’s modernization discourse and against India’s mainstream popular films. After India’s independence in 1947, if Nehru’s nation building developed technological infrastructure—dams, heavy industry, and transportation—emphasizing science and technology, then national identity was envisioned through retrieving its cultural heritage. Towards this end various state-sponsored literary, visual, and performance art academies were established, that precluded cinema. Inspired by De Sica and Renoir, Ray in the mid-1950 became the exemplar of art cinema, regarded “good cinema,” mobilizing state support, which aimed to eventually transform the mainstream industry. Indian art cinema emerged through a compact between Indian art producers, critics, film societies, and institutionalized state support. This paper examines both tensions between social classes and the idealization of art through tropes of purity and contamination in Ray’s film, Jalsaghar/The Music Room (1958), a metonym for the art-commercial cinema divide tied to class structure. The film mobilizes cultural power by encoding an imaginary of relations between the arts, classes, and symbolic capital. Jalsaghar’s film analysis introduces two historical developments: the divide between art and commercial cinema and the groundwork for a Bourdieusian field of restricted cultural production, a network of state and civil society institutions promoting art cinema.
Presenters
Jyotika VirdiAssociate Professor, Communication, Media and Film, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Indian Art Cinema, Class, Bourdieusian Framework
