Open AccessOrigins and Evolution of Indian Cinema: A Caleidoscopic Vision of India
Author(s) -
Carmen Escobedo de Tapia
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
revista canaria de estudios ingleses
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2530-8335
pISSN - 0211-5913
DOI - 10.25145/j.recaesin.2021.83.02
Subject(s) - movie theater , vision , hybridity , narrative , mysticism , liminality , perspective (graphical) , construct (python library) , mimicry , aesthetics , history , sociology , literature , anthropology , art , visual arts , computer science , programming language , ecology , biology
The Western image of India has traditionally been based on the attraction of stereotypes like the exotic, the mystical or the spiritual; if this imaginative construct is evident in literature, with examples like Paul Scott’s The Jewel in The Crown and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I suggest that this recreation could also be applicable to cinema through stereotypcal visions that originally appear in films about India. In this article I aim to explain the evolution of Indian cinema as a genre of its own, using postcolonial concepts like ‘mimicry’, ‘hybridity’ or ‘liminality’ discussed by H.K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), and through the threefold perspective developed by Priyamvada Gopal in The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009).