A brief introduction to popular cinema in Bengal: genre, stardom, public cultures

Abstract

This paper discusses the emergence and evolution of cinema in Bengal as a form of public culture since the early 20th century to its contemporary phase. Locating this cinema within the crosscurrents of political, historical and cultural transformation, the paper begins with reviewing the scholarship on Bengali cinema that has materialised over the last two decades. While a holistic history of Bengali cinema is still to be written, the scholarly works produced so far have revealed the problematic of writing such a history. We argue no linear narrative is possible, for so-called Bengali cinema, as the category of ‘regional cinema’ in India, is a product of conflicting forces, as regards to political conditions, industry, aesthetics, taste and target viewership. The construction of Bengali popular cinema, as distinct from a more widely circulated national cinema represented by the Bombay film industry, is an intriguing and complex process. This note summarising the scholarly contributions to this issue, proposes that a revisionist history of “Bengali” cinema could be possibly written, through an investigation of industry dynamics over the decades: technological transformations in filmmaking, changing economic networks of film production and distribution, publicity strategies, public cultures of film viewing, and the wide range of audiences the different forms of film have targeted, from the studio era to the present day. While shifting the focus from auteur studies and analyses of film texts as self-contained material, this ‘introduction’ propose that a new historiography of popular cinema in Bengal could be drawn by examining the dynamics of the emergence of stars and construction of stardom, along with a critical assessment of repeated success of certain genres and tropes over the decades.​