How the Emergency in the 1970s undermined the New Indian Cinema movement

Ashish Rajadhyaksha rightly underlined the Emergency’s “complicated presence” in the history of New Indian Cinema. He wrote, “There may indeed be a connection between the state support of independent cinema and the vicious disciplining of the mainstream film industry: a national project around media control gone badly wrong.” He rightly concluded that the Emergency affected the form and aesthetics of the New Cinema movement, and called it “aesthetics of state control”.

Secondly, due to the Emergency, the practitioners of India’s New Cinema found themselves in the middle of a storm. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy share an important incident from Karnataka New Cinema industry.

In Karnataka the makers of Samskara felt the hand of the Emergency in a more cruel fashion. Snehalatha Reddy, the leading actress in Samskara and wife of its director Pattabhi Rama Reddy, was accused of concealing information about the whereabouts of George Fernandes, a trade union leader whose arrest had been ordered in the Emergency roundup. She was known to be a friend of the Fernandeses. She denied knowledge of his whereabouts and was jailed and questioned for eight months. An asthmatic deprived of needed medicines, she fell seriously ill, and was released only when near death. She died in January, 1977 – five days after...

Read more