Origins and Evolution of Indian Cinema: a Caleidoscopic Vision of India

Abstract

The Western image of India has traditionally been based on the attraction of stereotypes like the exotic, the mystical or the spiritual; if this imaginative construct is evident in literature, with examples like Paul Scott’s The Jewel in The Crown and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I suggest that this recreation could also be applicable to cinema through stereotypical visions that originally appear in films about India. In this article I aim to explain the evolution of Indian cinema as a genre of its own, using postcolonial concepts like ‘mimicry’, ‘hybridity’ or ‘liminality’ discussed by H.K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), and through the threefold perspective developed by Priyamvada Gopal in The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009).