I n India, cinema speaks many languages. “To have not seen the films of Satyajit Ray,” Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese director, once said, “is to have lived in the world without ever having seen the moon and the sun.” Yet I know Ray’s moons and suns simply because we spoke the same language. The Calcutta fil MMA ker made most of his movies in Bengali, and growing up in a Bengali family, I didn’t need subtitles to understand Aparajito or Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne . It was like being from Liverpool and learning about Paul McCartney. Ray was ours . Similarly, friends from Kerala grew up venerating Malayalam masters like G. Aravindan and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. We stayed away from each other’s great movies because of limited access, horrid subtitling, and linguistic alienation. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way India watches movies. The Hindi film industry—headquartered in Mumbai, formerly called Bombay, therefore named “Bollywood”—is losing its hold. Over the last four years, movie...
Comments
Post a Comment