Abstract
Anugyan Nag and Spandan Bhattacharya, Tollygunge to Tollywood: The Bengali Film Industry Reimagined (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2021), 214 pp. ₹760, ISBN 978-93-5442-034-4(Paperback).
This book attempts to understand the evolution of the Bengali film industry based out of Tollygunge, Kolkata to ‘Tollywood’, 1 its post-liberalisation avatar. The book looks at its history since the late 1970s, which was when the film industry started experiencing severe financial problems. The death of superstar Uttam Kumar (often hailed as a ‘one-man industry’) in 1980 only complicated things further for the industry. Other factors such as stiff competition from Hindi films with superior production values, and lack of sufficient exhibition spaces (that were not already taken over by Hindi cinema) despite the efforts of the state government, resulted in an existential crisis for the film industry in the 1980s. Apart from the structural problems endemic to the industry, this time- period also witnessed the rise of a ‘crisis narrative’. This narrative, coming mostly from the bhadralok (the educated, middle-class gentry), rues the fall from grace of Bengali cinema from its golden period of ‘tasteful’, ‘cultured’ and literary cinema. This discourse on ‘taste’, which seems to be uniquely central to Bengali cinema, has been powerful enough to shape the public discourse on cinema for decades. Though the authors acknowledge this powerful discourse, they make a deliberate scholarly choice of not getting embroiled in subjective debates about taste, which so often elude the topic of the very class distinctions of which they are reflective. Instead, the authors focus on analysing the constantly changing political economy of the industry. They manage in this way to account for the changes brought by the liberalisation of the economy, such as the corporate consolidation of the industry, the dangers of monopoly and the convergence of different media. Using this method, the authors ultimately manage to also account for the parallel–mainstream cinema divide without resorting to the category of ‘taste’.
In their political economy approach, the authors draw from an impressive array of press reports, film society and journalistic writings on cinema, industry reports and correspondence with industry insiders including directors, other crew members, exhibitors and distributors. The first chapter begins in the time period of the 1980s, which witnessed the birth of the ‘crisis narrative’ amid mounting financial problems and the death of Uttam Kumar. The book explains all the contours of the financial crisis in detail including the lack of exhibition spaces, the pattern and concentration of cinema theatres in Kolkata and the districts, stiff competition from Hindi cinema, ineffective state government policies, intra-industry relations and so on. The book looks with an equal lack of sentimentality and nostalgia at various key historical factors, like the legacy of Uttam Kumar, or the revival of the industry with the release of Shatru/Adversary (Anjan Chowdhury, 1984), a popular film that went against dominant bhadralok tastes.
The second chapter deals with the formation and rise of Shree Venkatesh Films (SVF).
Like the previous one, this chapter pieces together a history in which individual filmmakers increasingly adopted popular elements and better production techniques in their cinema while keeping fingers on the pulse of a changing audience. While this new popular cinema invited sniggers from the bhadralok audience who lamented the demise of the golden age of Bengali cinema, it also led to the eventual formation of SVF in 1995 by Shrikant Mohta and Mahendra Soni. SVF started off as a film distribution company in 1995 and then entered film production in 1996. Through a case study of SVF, the book shows the gradual process of Tollywood’s corporatisation. To give readers a sense of granular history, the chapter covers myriad changes in the industry such as the coming of multiplexes, the launch of the music TV channel Sangeet Bangla, the launch of new faces that would go on to become the next generation of stars, introduction of big budgets and the blockbuster model, revamping of Tollywood and Bollywood connections, the pervasiveness of foreign locations in Bengali cinema of this era and the proclivity to copy films from other industries. The chapter is attentive to how the business practices of SVF, such as vertical integration from production to distribution, led to its virtual monopoly over the entire industry. This chapter also provides the necessary information and tools of interpretation to understand how the bhadralok disdain for popular Bengali cinema was ultimately assimilated for profit in the new corporatised Tollywood. The next chapter, which deals with the ‘new parallel cinema’, might have dealt with this in more detail.
The third chapter situates the ‘new parallel’ Bengali cinema since the late 1990s within the ‘regimes of production, circulation and institutional policy’ (p. 104). The authors stay away from getting into textual analyses of the films or talking about their ideological leanings. However, their political economic analysis of the industry ecosystem explains how the ‘new parallel cinema’, itself drawing from the lineage of high-brow, respectable Bengali cinema of yesteryears, was configured within a new industry set-up through a mutually symbiotic relationship with the more popular mainstream cinema. The chapter discusses the construction of an imagined past in this new parallel cinema as the site of loss for the bhadralok class, how nostalgia came to be the cornerstone of the parallel cinema narratives and how the emergence of a new urban middle class in liberalised India from an older bhadralok class is the site of contradictions for the Bengali middle class’s self-image. The chapter then goes on to examine how Rituparno Ghosh became emblematic of the new parallel cinema, characterised by ‘the assurance of the “difference” and the superiority from the run-of-the-mill Bengali films’ (p. 142). The analysis of Ghosh’s star text shows how he was able to re-present a distinctive persona marked by genteel culture, literariness and taste, within a new public sphere characterised by the convergence of different media like cinema, print, television, radio, the internet, and so on.
As the authors deliberately stay away from textual analysis of the films, the book misses out on commenting on the ideological relationship between this new parallel cinema and mainstream cinema. Even though they use terms such as ‘taste’, ‘better cinema’, ‘difference’, and so on within quotes to mark that it is not their original usage, they do not problematise the elitist discourse that assumes the general public to be ignorant of the nuances of high culture. For example, in Rituparno Ghosh’s star study, the authors highlight a debate in print media on whether Ghosh’s film Dosar was plagiarised from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue. They point out that such a discussion set Ghosh apart from the mainstream in the sense that his work was worthy of serious debate. However, they do not examine why exactly parallel cinema is considered to be superior. The book misses out on presenting a valid criticism of this new parallel cinema characterised by an awkward marriage of a confused sense of loss and images of neoliberal consumption, drawing its distinction from an implicit sense of disdain for whatever the masses like.
The fourth chapter completes the analysis of the corporatisation of the Tollygunge film industry and its transformation into Tollywood by looking at the media convergence that went into its making. The chapter looks at different media—television (including cable and satellite channel rights), print, radio and the internet—and how these successfully formed mutually beneficial relationships with cinema. The chapter also explores how this media ecosystem has been making attempts to monetise the still largely untapped market of Bengalis (from India and Bangladesh as well as diasporic Bengalis abroad). Networks of fandom and modes of circulation amongst diasporic audiences become crucial factors in maximising the potential of this market.
The authors argue that by utilising the proliferation of media in the new millennium (itself a feature of the liberalised economy), Bengali cinema could shed the burden of the ‘crisis narrative’ and reach a more celebratory consensus about its state of affairs.
With each passing chapter, as the authors describe the transformation of the industry into a corporatised one, marked by a convergence of media that is characteristic of a contemporary culture industry, never does the telling of this history seem inevitable or teleological. Much has been written about the transformation of the Hindi film industry in the post-liberalisation period. However, the authors pay sufficient attention to the minute details of the Bengali film industry’s history so that this historiography does not become a mere version of the grand Bollywood metanarrative. Any study of Indian cultural industries, such as Bollywood or Tollywood, would necessarily show the effects of economic liberalisation in media proliferation, the gentrification of the mass audience base and so on. However, this book stays clear of any formulaic historical narrative and pays attention to the Bengali film industry’s own historical specificities, and in that process, it adds to the larger scholarly corpus that seeks to understand the transformation of culture industries in the neoliberal era. This book will also serve as a guiding text that provides a foundational framework for more specific studies on Bengali cinema that are yet to be undertaken.