HISTORY OF HINDI SILENT CINEMA
HISTORY OF HINDI SILENT CINEMA COMMEMORATION | SILENTS PLEASE Share Tweet Dinshaw Billimoria and Sulochana in Ardeshir Irani’s Heer Ranjha made in 1929. Photo: Courtesy Donnabelle Garga. India might be celebrating the centenary of cinema this year, but it’s fair to say that the show and tell can begin only from around the mid-1930s. The country’s various film industries produced a little over 1,300 silent films from the late 1800s before moving to sound from 1931 onwards, but barely 20 titles have survived. The picture of Indian cinema resembles a building with several storeys and a hollowed out basement. Much of what has endured into the digital age is in bits and bobs. Devotees of the pre-talkies pioneers can take some hope from the surviving material, even if hope must be parcelled out in pieces. There is a fair amount of recent scholarship, DVDs of three silents, and occasional screenings of the extant films, to remin...