Hindi Cinema has evolved in the last two decades….

The list of winners in the recently announced National Film Awards is very significant. Amitabh Bachchan won the award for Best Actor, Paa was named as the Best Hindi Film, 3 Idiots won the award for the Most Pouplar Film, Delhi 6 won the award for the Best Feature Film on National Integration. All these films were based on socially relevant issues, but they were not just movies with a message. Their social conscience had been polished into a glossy sheen, and tailored for mass viewing and public acceptance. This is a clear indication of Hindi cinema’s evolution in the last 20 years or so.

If one takes a look at previous National Film Award (NFA) ceremonies, one would feel how much the paradigm has shifted in Indian cinema. Movies that used to regularly take honours at the NFA were those by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal, directors who had impeccable credentials for parallel cinema. At the other end of the spectrum you had Yash Chopra, who used mass entertainment as their weapon and bagged the most popular film award categories at the NFA. There was a distinction of the two genres of films.

Now that demarcation has blurred significantly. This can be attributed to a generation of film directors in our country who have shaped their artistic sensibilities after liberalisation. They are equally aware of our current socio-political milieu and the Bollywood potboilers. This breed of directors make experimental cinema of a kind that may have been impossible in the era of single-screen theatres. However, innovation in Hindi cinema is still a work in progress and it has to come at par with the best of the West. The good thing is that it has surely demonstrated its capacity for reinvention. I think that the best from Hindi cinema is yet to come.