Throughout its short history, cinema appears to have fallen prey to countless categorisations. I tend to think that while this approach has its advantages – we like our art history organised into neat piles – it doesn't do justice to individual talent, to the sui generis. And so, calling De Sica a neo-realist and assigning to Godard the pigeonhole of the nouvelle vague adds little to my understanding of the complex and evolving visions of these filmmakers. For the same reason it's strange to find Satyajit Ray being termed a figurehead of that geometric absurdity called 'parallel cinema', as though this movement was progressing in the same direction, albeit from a distance, as the mainstream. Even more confounding is the epithet of 'middle cinema' – an obvious euphemism for middlebrow – bestowed in India upon movies that are not quite art house and not quite mainstream.
And how do we contend with that elephant in the room: Bollywood. The term has often been used as a pejorative in the past, suggesting a cheap derivative of Hollywood (one is reminded of 'impressionists', which was initially a term of abuse, but was later assimilated). There are still some within the Hindi film industry who take umbrage at the term, and maybe for good reason, given that Bollywood itself has diversified over the years, for better or for worse.
Now, within this complicated mess – this labyrinth of signposts directing us exactly nowhere – we still have to somehow account for that niche category of filmmaking identified the world over as 'independent'. In the simplest of terms, independent filmmaking is an attempt to break the monopoly of major studios which largely maintain a stranglehold on the creative freedoms of writers and directors. But we must remember that most independent filmmakers still depend on big studios for the distribution of their films, implying that the break from the mainstream hasn't been as definite as one would like to assume. In this attempt to understand contemporary Indian cinema, I am beginning with the credo that categorising art can amount to simplifying it. So when I use the term 'independent' in the passages that follow, I use it, for valid reasons, loosely.
I spoke to filmmakers who straddle the divide between independent cinema and Bollywood, as well as to those who are now attempting to carve a niche for themselves within a more resolutely independent space of filmmaking, setting themselves in opposition to the mainstream and everything it stands for.