Sunil Sethi: Turning a new page in film writing

AL FRESCO

Kala Ghoda in south Mumbai is one of the city's busiest junctions, a fume-choked intersection of traffic jams, pedestrians and pavement vendors. Thanks to the city's small band of conservationists and activists it is now gradually being restored as a "heritage mile" with many of its crumbling buildings dating from the late 19th century getting a facelift. One particular building, however, has remained in a desperate state of disrepair for decades, which is shameful, because in a city that is the country's film and financial capital, it is a landmark in the history of cinema. This is the old Watson's Hotel, where the Lumiere brothers first unveiled their "moving pictures" in 1896""the very same year they were first shown in London, St Petersburg and New York. "The Marvel of the Century...The Wonder of the World...Living Photographic Pictures...In Life-Sized Reproductions...Admission One Rupee" announced an ad in The Times of India.

The Indian film industry is not just the largest but among the oldest in the world, a place bursting with so much talent, energy and history, and so many stranger-than-fiction stories, that it always confounds me why it has, by and large, failed to produce at least a fraction of engaging chroniclers, biographers and tellers of truth tales in proportion to its staggering output. My library is well-stocked with film books from around the world but there are no more than a baker's dozen of excellent or entertaining books on Indian cinema by Indians.

For film history there is Indian Film by Erik Barnouw and S Krishnaswamy, thorough but dated, and subsequent books by B D Garga, Ashish Rajadhayksha and Firoze Rangoonwalla. For biographies and critical examination there are the intrepid London-based filmmaker and interviewer Nasreen Kabir's books on Guru Dutt and Javed Akhtar, among other quickies. There is Meghnad Desai's splendid account of Dilip Kumar, in which the economist and Labour peer, possibly for the first time, investigates how the meteoric rise of a film star reflected the political and social aspirations of his time""Dilip Kumar may not be an eminent Nehruvian but how he exemplifies Nehru's vision of the secular nation-state.

Many Muslim actors of Dilip Kumar's generation adopted Hindu screen names""unthinkable today, proof being the number of reigning Khans""but among the many nuggets Desai ferrets out is that Dilip Kumar, in his stupendously long screen career, played a Muslim character only once""that of Prince Salim in Mughal-e-Azam.

For all its claims of being an up-to-date cinema that is going global, the Indian film industry, when it comes to analysing itself or preserving its past, remains a pretty backward place. With their monumental egos and aggrandised images, its film-makers and stars betray a weakness for badly-scripted hagiographies and glossies in the genre known as "vanity publishing". They wouldn't know what Watson's Hotel stands for whereas, with their combination of wealth and clout, they could turn it into the country's premier museum of film history""a tribute to the city and their collective story.

Still, there is a chance that film writing may be turning a new page. A slew of books, non-fiction and fiction, present a new take on film and film-makers. Critic Anupama Chopra's biography of Shah Rukh Khan is a readable account of how a beleagured unknown from Delhi changed the rules in nepotistic, insular Bollywood. It puts Shah Rukh's rise in context as the face of liberalising India in the early 1990s and a brand created by charisma-building and canny alignments. Historian B D Garga has produced a valuable history of the documentary and non-fiction film in India, From Raj to Swaraj. The poet and novelist Tabish Khair's new novel Filmings is inspired by Saadat Hasan Manto's journey in filmdom. But the most curious of all is a new English translation of the late, great Ismat Chughtai's Urdu novel Ajeeb Aadmi (A Very Strange Man)""a thinly-disguised roman a clef on the Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rahman affair that destoyes his life and wife but left a lasting legacy in film.