An alternative imaginary: The history of Bengali cinema, c. 1921--1961

This dissertation is the first comprehensive historical work on Bengali cinema. The period covered in this dissertation spans the years between cinema's emergence as a popular form in Bengal and the arrival of Bengali cinema on the international stage as the Indian art film. It analyzes the distinctiveness of a cinema which constructed an exclusionist ideology, one that was related to a middle-class worldview whose essence was "Bengaliness" and "Bengali culture". It makes the argument that Bengali cinema has been a key economic and social institution, which must be considered for what it brings to bear upon our existing sense of Bengali and Indian history. Typically, Bengali cinema has been subsumed within the body of 'Indian' cinema, when, in reality, the Bengali filmic imaginary existed over and above the imaginary of the Indian nation. This dissertation therefore constructs a definitive history of the Bengali cinema, and makes a case for this history as positing an alternative understanding to the currently influential notion of an Indian or 'national' cinema. It argues that the Bengali cinema presents a history which brings to the fore the deeply contested terrain of 'national' cinema, as also its ultimate subversion, and posits the creation of what I call the "alternative imaginary" of the Bengali film. The case of the Bengali cinema demonstrates the emergence of a public domain that set up a definitive discourse of difference with respect to the "all-India" Hindi film (popularly classified as Bollywood cinema), thus preempting, consciously, its own subsumption within the more pervasive culture of the Bombay Hindi cinema. While Bengali cinema could not ultimately compete with the "all-India" Hindi film, it was able to create a domain which steadfastly resisted the construction of India as a Hindi-nation.