bollywood history
Film arrived in India on July seven 1896, when the short films of the Lumire bros were shown at the Watkins Hotel in central Bombay. In 1913 DG Phalke, a successful printer, was impressed by seeing The Life Of Christ on a visit to London. On returning to India, he made the nation’s first feature film Raja Harishchandra, primarily based on one of the stories in the spiritual classic The Mahabharata. The film was a big success. India’s film industry hasn’t looked back.
Silent theatre was snatched by artists as a chance to make a really global art, one which had not one of the language barriers that appeared with the arrival of sound. While for the rest of the planet it meant theatre could extend past national limits, for India, with masses of languages, silent theatre made a skill that reached outside the state’s many differences. The flow of the Indian upper classes forwards and backwards between England and India also made a contribution to a boost in the medium.
Producer Himansu Rai and actress Devika Rani returned to India to run one of the first studios together, Bombay Talkies. Rani featured in his first talkie, Karma ( 1933 ) and went on to become India’s first major female star. In 1931 sound came to Indian theatre with the smash Alam Ara ( dir Ardeshir Irani ), creating song and dance as a part of the storytelling. It also split the film industry along language lines : these broadly being the Hindi belt in the north and the 2 major language blocks in the south, Tamil and Telegu. But just about each language has its own theatre for people that only understand Kanada or Gujarati and so on.
Crucially, it also put a barrier up to the exhibition of Western films. With sound came isolation, and India was able to build a flourishing, distinct native industry to serve its cinema-crazy, generally illiterate audience.