Producing Bollywood: Inside The Contemporary Hindi Film Industry - Plot & Excerpts
was explicitly nationalist in his motivation for making films—he wanted to create Indian images for Indian audiences and establish a completely indigenous or swadeshi industry.6 Yet the Indian National Congress (INC), one of the main organizations fighting against colonial rule, did not accord the medium much importance. Most leaders viewed the cinema as “low” and “vulgar” entertainment, popular with the uneducated “masses” (Kaul 1998). These attitudes are exemplified in the public statements of two of the most prominent leaders of the independence struggle, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. While Gandhi rejected film on the whole as immoral and culturally inauthentic, Nehru viewed film as a dangerous but potentially useful pedagogical medium. Meanwhile, filmmakers at the time responded to their public statements not by countering their criticisms, but by casting film within the terms of discourse set by Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi’s antipathy toward cinema, which probably stemmed from it being a “foreign”
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