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Sunday, March 29, 2020

Post Partition

The Indian Masala film — a slang term used for commercial films with a mix of song, dance, romance etc. — arose following World War II. South Indian cinema gained prominence throughout India with the release of S.S. Vasan's Chandralekha.During the 1940s cinema in South India accounted for nearly half of India's cinema halls and cinema came to be viewed as an instrument of cultural revival. The partition of India following its independence divided the nation's assets and a number of studios went to the newly formed Pakistan.

The Partition of India in 1947 also greatly affected Indian cinema and many films were made on this historic event for many years to come. The Golden Age of Indian cinema came following the independence of India in 1947 which saw the rise of a new genre of Indian cinema called parallel cinema, which was predominantly led by Bengali cinema. A few examples of films from this era were Nagarik by Ritwik Ghatak (1952) and Do Biga Zameen by Bimal Roy (1953). By the mid 1950s, Satyajit Ray had made his entry into Indian Cinema and made Pather Panchali in 1955 which was the first part of his famous Apu trilogy.

Commercial cinema too was mushrooming and some of the most popular commercial film in the 1950s and '60s were Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955) Pyaasa (1957), Mother India (1957) Kaagaz  Ke Phool (1959) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960).
The Indian government established a Films Division by 1948 which eventually became one of the largest documentary film producers in the world with an annual production of over 200 short documentaries, each released in 18 languages with 9000 prints for permanent film theatres across the country.
The Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), an art movement with a communist inclination, began to take shape through the 1940s and the 1950s. A number of realistic IPTA plays, such as Bijon Bhattacharya's Nabanna in 1944 (based on the tragedy of the Bengal famine of 1943), prepared the ground for the solidification of realism in Indian cinema, exemplified by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth) in 1946. The IPTA movement continued to emphasize on reality and went on to produce Mother India and Pyaasa, among India's most recognizable cinematic productions

Commercial cinema continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s and is today flourishing as one of the most popular and loved genres in Indian cinema today. Like in the past, Indian films still continue winning prominent awards at home and abroad.

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