NEW DELHI: It was odd to find Dr Girish Karnad, eminent author and noted cinema and theater personality delivering the Jawaharlal Nehru memorial lecture organized by the Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative Limited (IFFCO).
The link, as he explained, was the iconic movie ‘Manthan’ in which he participated as actor and writer and which successfully spread the message of the cooperative movement. The theme of his lecture was ‘Indian Cinema and the Creation of Nation’ in which he contended that not only cinema reflected the development of each era, it also influenced the life of the people of that period.
Dr Karnad said he wanted to tackle the question how the Indian cinema, which started life as a cheap form of entertainment, “despised by the cultural and political leaders and held in suspicion by the very society it sought to entertain, had managed to become in the eyes of the world the glory of India?”
Answering the question, he said, “While most regional cinemas concentrated on their language markets, from the very start Hindi cinema reached out to grasp the whole of India. It ignored the specific problems of the Hindi region totally and carefully made films which could attract audiences in far corners of the country.
It thus created a totally new environment in which for the first time in the entire history of India the same work of entertainment was being enjoyed and shared by different people in different parts of India at the very same time.”
The second factor was the language of these films. People who did not understand Hindi all over India could understand this language. Karnad claims that, “In fact, generations after generations people in non-Hindi regions of India learnt Hindi thanks to the films.”
The third factor was music. “With the arrival of sound, movies in the West began to talk while in India they began to sing. And they never looked back; there was now a distinctly Indian Cinema. The fear of competition from outside (Hollywood) simply disappeared overnight.”
India’s love of music Karnad traced to the Bhakti tradition and Sufism, both of which insisted that you could approach God without rituals. “It was enough to surrender to him, sing out to him.”
Karnad said, “Today, we take the term ‘Indian Music’ for granted as though such an entity was always there ready-made and easily understood everywhere. Not so.
It is a product painfully and sensitively created by our music directors of the forties and fifties – S.D Burman, Naushad Ali, C. Ramachandra, and so many more. They borrowed from folk music, used classical tunes, plundered rock music and Western pop, which they remolded to Indian rhythms and lilt, to create an Indian idiom.”
Later, talking to reporters, Karnad said Indian cinema was doing extremely well and it should not be judged by Western parameters. “I think the films that are being made are very good. We should not judge by Western standards. We say why don’t our films get Oscars? Why do we need an Oscar? Suddenly, AR Rahman becomes great because he got an Oscar but he was great even before that.”
Karnad believes Indian cinema has successfully warded off Hollywood invasion because of its song and dance tradition. “If we would have made films like Satyajit Ray, continued without song and dance, we would have been swallowed up by Hollywood by now. Our songs and dancers have protected us. So, why should we give up our strength?” he added.
It is noteworthy that like many other Indian personalities, Dr Karnad also has links with America. In 1987-88, he was at the University of Chicago as Visiting Professor. During his tenure, ‘Nagamandala’ had its world premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis based on Dr Karnad’s English translation of the Kannada original. In 1994 he was honored with Honorary Doctorate by the University of Southern California.
Vinod Dhawan
India Post News Service
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