Outlook India. Indian Cinema: 1995 - 2005.

Sandipan Deb opens a special issue of Outlook India: "The last 10 years of Indian cinema have seen traditions thrive and die, formulas soar and sputter, entire new categories and idioms created within mainstream Indian cinema." It's the very next sentence that rings with poignant immediacy in the wake of Sunday's bombings of two cinemas in New Delhi (see Randeep Ramesh's story in the Guardian). "Above all, it was a decade that saw more risk-taking than ever before. With subjects, treatment, roles, language, techniques and limits."

Despite that unexpected and alarming resonance, this is, overall, a celebratory issue spiced with well-intended criticism where called for. A good place to begin exploring is the timeline spotlighting the highlights and stars - or even better, the excellent companion piece by Rachel Dwyer - then maybe the poll of over a thousand "randomly selected Hindi film buffs in Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Hyderbad and Pune," a web-only collection of recollections of six filmmakers, a game of numerology, and then:

• Namrata Joshi: "It was not difficult for us at Outlook to decide that Aamir Khan was 'the most interesting star of the decade.'" Plus: An interview.

• Making a documentary about Shah Rukh Khan is both exhilarating and exhausting, writes Nasreen Munni Kabir: "The way SRK's NRI fans react to him has a different intensity compared to those on a Mumbai street. Influenced by the culture of their adopted homes, his fans in Dallas or Washington behave like most American teenagers would, say, at a JLo or a Britney Spears concert."

• Jerry Pinto argues that there's been "a regressive streak in Hindi commercial cinema... When did we decide to make love another commodity?"

• Sanjay Suri on the women of Bollywood: "Sometime over the last 10 years, what could have been cinema turned into a celluloid catwalk."

• In "The Closet is Ajar," Shohini Ghosh traces the slow but sure emergence of gay and lesbian concerns on Indian screens.

• Suveen K Sinha explains what's new and different about Bollywood singing lately.

• Indian stars and filmmakers are closer than ever to crossing over to international stardom, but they're still not quite there yet, notes N Chandra Mohan.

• Asha'ar Rehman has a particularly interesting piece on Pakistani views of Hindi cinema that ends with a plea: "Peace could make better cinema."

• Saibal Chatterjee: "[T]he last 10 years saw the independent strand of India's regional cinema negotiate the ups and downs of life with composure even as commercial rewards and critical accolades eluded it."

• S Theodore Baskaran on the mix of movies and politics in Tamil Nadu; similarly, SV Srinivas and S Anand.

• Director Ram Madhvani on why he prefers listening to screenplays to reading them.

• Labonita Ghosh on a mainstream genre of Bengali cinema aimed specifically at local audiences.

• Bhavani Iyer, who wrote Black: "[W]hile the world looks at our cinema with indulgent amusement and tries to understand and examine and dissect our movies, we continue watching them with unashamed, unabashed pride."

• Rahul Bose: "Every now and then a gloriously oblivious filmmaker will blithely miss the grave danger of trying to marry box office success with critical acclaim and proceed to make a film that does just that."

• Aparajita Krishna on the actor most recently celebrated with a retro in New York, Amitabh Bachchan.

• Director Anurag Kashyap lists ten guilty pleasures.

• Vinod Mehta looks back on his brief career as a film critic.

Posted by dwhudson at May 24, 2005 8:14 AM