THE FILMS OF LITTLE INDIA: "Bombay Talkies" at Park Avenue

Each generation will also discover its own "classics." Some films are sought out and are therefore treasured, like prize trophies. It is not so much the film, but the process of arriving at it which endows the whole process with meaning. This may explain, in some ways, the perversity of our choices. The preference is to avoid the given, the immediate, and to seek out the distant, that which involves difficulties and adventure. Thus, accustomed to a certain middle-class scorn of the popular Bombay cinema, I began to explore ecletically: the Hollywood cinema, the cinema of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, foreign films, the earlier traditions of Indian cinema of the 1930s and 40s. Our delight in the cinema lies in the lure of the new that the film society milieu represents. Even American films opened new worlds of fantasy and imagination. In places in which cultural choices were limited, perhaps the Hindi cinema itself embodied just that: a place in which anything could happen and the far-fetched did not seem so remote. Consider, in this context, the new "theme" of the "non resident Indian" which is rapidly becoming a staple of the Bombay cinema. Even as it puts fundamental existential choices into conflict, a hypocrite cinema appeals, on the one side, to a fantasy of western life (mansions, helicopters, inter- continental travel, money, e.g. Pardes) and, on the other, to a fantasy of integrated Eastern ways (large, happy families, continuities, leisure, servants, ritual, hierarchy, patriarchy, e.g. Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge). These complexities makes the recent (and still incomplete) festival of popular Bombay films at the Asia Society so potentially interesting. It also signals a growing desire to present contemporary Asian culture, and also to search out new audiences. The six films in the series are classics and landmarks from the recent history of the "modern" Indian cinema: Awara (1951), Mother India (1957), Pakeezah (1971), Sholay (1975) Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1980) and Bombay (1997). Of course, when we speak of the "modern" it is what in the vocabulary of the cinema would be called modern. There have been Indian films from the early part of this century, but very little before Independence is commonly known. Mehboob's Andaz (with [Nargis] and [Raj Kapoor] and Dilip Kumar, 1949) came to define the modern cinema, in the way it dealt with the contemporary world in an economical way and presented characters attempting to negotiate the difficulti