Exploring Regional Cinema in Contemporary India

Abstract

In this work, an attempt has been made to understand the role of select regional cinema in India from the states of Tamil Nadu, the erstwhile undivided Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. By examining the life of South Indian film stars M. G. Ramachandran and N. T. Rama Rao, I tried to understand how the medium of film helped them to achieve electoral success in Tamil Nadu and the erstwhile undivided Andhra Pradesh respectively. Focusing on the works of Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengali filmmaker, I tried to study how a film maker writes the history of the tragic events. The work on Ghatak also tried to explore how he used cinema as a political tool and how in his cinema he questioned the identity of the post-colonial Bengal society. In short, the research attempts to see the trajectories of cinema beyond Bollywood.