The Supercrat
Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee's principal secretary, has emerged as a strong power centre. But his critics say he has bitten off more than he can chew and has become the target of a proxy war against the prime minister.

Going Beyond Square One
India and Pakistan make subtle shifts in their positions on Kashmir, raising hopes of a renewed dialogue and restoration of peace. Much will depend on what happens during Ramzan.

Fifth Column
by Tavleen Singh
Multinational Myths

Prime Movers

Action Manifested

BOOKS

Cinema Paradiso

A French critic's love letter to Indian cinema

By Madhu Jain

This tome is a goldmine for journos, writers, scholars and quizmasters in search of information and trivia about Indian cinema. Everything you wanted to know, or didn't, about the largest, most vibrant film industry in the world is here.

That said, there is something terribly PIBish (Press Information Bureau) about the French scholar's peregrinations through Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood and auteurhood (the successive new waves of Indian cinema), and the NFDC school of filmmaking. Yves Thoraval has obviously kept a calculator at hand. So if you want to know how many films were made in a particular year, how many have been made so far, the number of exhibitors, travelling theatres ... this is your book. We are, in fact, in sheet land, and this is a portable library for cine-tidbits and Indian history in bullets. And the canvas is large: from its embryonic stage in 1896 with the historic unspooling of the Lumiere brothers' L'Arrive d'un Train a la Gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at the Ciotat Station) at Hotel Watson, Mumbai, when the audience thought the train was coming at them, to the latest gyrations of Bollywood 2000 and the foray into Non-Resident Indian land. Whew! That explains the title of this book, just cinema of India would not do.

The author takes the reader on a Bharat darshan of Indian cinema, ferreting out names and details of films and filmmakers from across the country. And this is where the book's value lies. Thoraval's bird's-eye view also takes in films from the North-east, and he spends considerable wordage on Tamil, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam cinema. Moreover, his insights into the films of the greats of Indian cinema-Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Aravindan-are worthwhile.

It is a pity Thoraval did not linger longer on some of the more significant trends in Indian cinema. For he does make some interesting observations about Indians being "iconophiles" - the photographs of filmstars who played gods in films were placed in prayer rooms next to images of real gods - from the very outset.

The author has a doctorate in Middle Eastern anthropology and it was during his years in the Middle East and East Africa that he first realised the reach and power of Indian cinema. "These countries were for a long time 'missionary post' territories for the Indian cinema industry," he writes in the preface.

So it is strange that he displays a lack of empathy when discussing commercial Indian cinema. A habitue of Indian film festivals, it is obvious that Thoraval is not too enamoured by the dream factory that is Bollywood. What he does succeed in capturing is the romance of the pioneers of Indian cinema. He is at his best when writing about the early days of the industry-from the silent days to the talkies. The book makes it clear that

Indian cinema was able to withstand Hollywood (unlike the cinemas of other countries) because it had developed its own identity long before Hollywood. In fact, the insertion of songs and the episodic nature of Indian films are a salute to Indian cinema's debt to Indian folk theatre and forms.

This is perhaps Yves Thoraval's love letter to Indian cinema, but the epistle could surely have been edited better. His sentences sometimes go on forever ... like centipedes.

MetroScape
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