Usher In The Light

Well, who needs the truth? Give us any day the shadows on the white screen in a dark hall telling us tales written in light and time. Tales of heroism and cowardice, love and hate, justice and inequity, of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. And if it is the Hindi film, give us the glycerine, and the trees to dance around, the white saree in the artificial rain, and the rising crescendo of a hundred violins. And endless debate on Sholay vs Deewaar, and Awara as opposed to Shri 420.

To bring an authentic perspective to this debate, and also to cheerfully stoke it, we decided to ask 25 film directors to give us their own lists of the 10 best Hindi films of independent India. Our jury included some of the most acclaimed, successful, interesting and awarded helmers in the country, from uber-showman Subhash Ghai to venerable Mrinal Sen, from visual wizard Santosh Sivan to enfant terrible Anurag Kashyap. Our only condition to them: you cannot name any of your own films.

The results throw up some fascinating questions. Why are, for instance, seven of the top 10 films from the 1950s and ’60s? The rest: Sholay and Deewaar, both 1975 releases, and then, amazingly, a gap of 26 years, before another film, Lagaan, scrapes in at No. 9. There is a message here for the Hindi film industry, and it may not just be about nostalgia. This list is the result of collating the independent individual choices of filmmakers. So, clearly, today’s Bollywood director wants to recreate the magic of these classic 1950s and ’60s films. And obviously, they feel their attempts have not been really successful. Except in Lagaan, where many of Hindi cinema’s grand themes coalesced and cohered perfectly.

Look at these 10 films. All of them have different themes, except for Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool to some extent (the honest artist).Yet each has an epic quality about it, a quality that has nothing to do with the film’s budget, or whether the hero is a Mughal prince or an uprooted peasant, and the story about the decay of the aristocracy or the heredity-environment conundrum. Except for Lagaan, every other film is either a tragedy or has an ending that cannot be classified glibly as "happy" or "sad". The poet is now famous, but he can maintain his aesthetic integrity only by renouncing society. The demonic lala is dead, but so is Birju, shot by his own mother. None of these classics can be dismissed as "escapist", even though all are situated firmly in the Hindi cinema mainstream. And most transcend their storylines to make a comment on the human condition.

Each of these films is an original vision, even Sholay, with its The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai roots. Each of them is the essence and pinnacle of its genre, whether "angry young man" or "triumph of the underdog". But above all, each of them embodies the extraordinary passion that the filmmaker brought to his work, whether it’s K. Asif’s decade-long struggle with Mughal-E-Azam, or Aamir Khan and Ashutosh Gowariker’s obsessive perfectionism in Lagaan.

Finally, that may be the only thing great films are about—passion.

So, go ahead now, give in to your own passion. Which is the greatest lost-and-found film? The funniest comedy? The best product of the parallel cinema movement? Which director’s films figure the most in the full roster? Answers to these and dozens of other questions are hiding in the next few pages. And feel free to disagree. For, it may be an art form that is viewed in a crowded hall, but the very darkness of the hall and the multi-sensory nature of those speaking shadows on the screen also make cinema an intimate, individual and solitary experience, unique to every man, woman and child who face the same way in an enclosed place to decipher the sculptures in time and light.