Bollywood, Tollywood and
Dollywood
Engl 332
N. Langah
Pre-Independence Cinema: 1930s and
1940s
 Kinship, social ties, values and ideals
 Films on religious themes were rebellious
 Westernization was critiqued as an impact of
colonization
 Western values were seen as threatening for Indian
familial and social traditions
1950s cinema
 The problems of fledging nation
Period beat of the 1970s:
Beat of resistance aesthetics which found three
different expressions in:
a. Mumbai-based industries refereed to in the past
decade or so as ‘Bollywood’
b. Kolkata based productions in Tollygunj as
‘Tollywood’
c. Dhaka-based productions called ‘Dollywood’
How Cinematic text is welded to the context of its
productions: Social Movements and the Politics of
Representation in the Cinema of the 1970s
Context of 1970s Bengal/India and India/Bangladesh.
 In India: Resistance against the rulings of the capital
globally. Economic turmoil, underemployment,
poverty, illiteracy, corruption
 In Pakistan: total warfare in response to Sheikh
Mujibur Rehman’s call for independence. Critics
propose India’s support of 1971 war in Pakistan. Food
crises, no industry, economic disorder
Bollywood in 1970s
 Social anxieties
 An aspiration of India in Nehru’s dream
 1950s to 1980s: stories woven around the protagonist
as the peripheral character (Shami Kapoor,
Dharmendra, Raj Kapoor, Amitabh)
 Melodrama, romance, social issues, religious issues,
satire, mystery/suspense/thriller.
Tollywood productions of the 1970s
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Melodrama
Comedy
Children’s cinema
Romance
Social issues
Religious issues
Outcome of such social movements:
 The social movements of the 1970s provide a
resistance aesthetic connecting alternative cinema
practices both in Tollywood and Dollywood with the
Hindi language productions from Mumbai.
South Asian Film
 Underlining the idea of nation and national culture
 Key sites on which the local, global and transnational
intersect with each other
 Q: how slippery and constructed the idea of ‘national’
in South Asian cinema can be
 Example: 1990sonwards: Bangladeshi and WestBengali popular film production and their
transnationalization and localization
Bengali Film Industry: Dhaka-Calcutta
 Bengali speaking audience within their national or
regional boundaries
 Audience: Bengali-speaking Bengali Muslims in
postcolonial Bangladesh and Bengali Hindus in West
Bengal and eastern India
 These two Bengali cinemas remain divided in terms of
the national and religious orientations of their
audience but share a common language
Bengali Film Industry: Dhaka-Calcutta
 Bengali Cinema of Calcutta : created a version of
colonial modernity propagated by Bengali-Hindu
middle class
 The first film made in Dhaka was 1955 (3 decades after
Calcutta. 1965 was also the time when Indian films
were banned in Pakistan and the Bangaldesh war was
about to happen
 After the creation of Bangladesh the film production
in Dhaka increased.
Bengali Film Industry: Dhaka-Calcutta
 The divide between Bengali Hindu Cinema (Calcutta)
and Bengali Muslim Cinema (Dhaka) becomes
stronger
 Calcutta and Dhaka share a love-hate relationship
 West-Bengali films (melodrama) were seen as model
family dramas in Bangladesh in 1960s and 1990s
 The film industry in Dhaka positions itself as the base
for a Bengali-Muslim cinema from 1960 onwards
Bengali Film Industry: Dhaka-Calcutta
 In the last decade or so, a number of Bengali Muslim
films (from Bangladesh) have been remade in
Calcutta film industry for Indian Hindu-Bengali
audience