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1950s movement in Indian cinema

This article is about the Indian film movement. For the Soviet film movement, see Soviet parallel cinema.

Parallel cinema, or New Indian Cinema, is a film movement in Indian cinema that originated in the state of West Bengal in the 1950s as an alternative to the mainstream commercial Indian cinema.

Inspired by Italian Neorealism, Parallel Cinema began just before the French New Wave and Japanese New Wave, and was a precursor to the Indian New Wave of the 1960s. The movement was initially led by Bengali cinema and produced internationally acclaimed filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Tapan Sinha and others. It later gained prominence in other film industries of India.

It is known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, symbolic elements with a keen eye on the sociopolitical climate of the times, and the general rejection of inserted song-and-dance routines that are typical of mainstream Indian films.

History

Origins

Realism in Indian cinema dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. One of the earliest examples was Baburao Painter's 1925 silent film classic Savkari Pash (Indian Shylock), about a poor peasant (portrayed by V. Shantaram) who "loses his land to a greedy moneylender and is forced to migrate to the city to become a mill worker. Acclaimed as a realistic breakthrou

Is biodiversity conservation part of the environmental movement? To what extent is the protection of species like tigers an integral part of wider concerns about transition to more sustainable lives on earth?  These questions came up at a recent meeting Conservation and Sustainability: Do We Practise What We Preach?, organised by the Cambridge Conservation Forum. The questions are simple enough.  The answers turn out to be a bit more complicated.

Historically, it’s a no-brainer.  The birth of the modern conservation movement in the late Nineteenth Century was strongly environmentalist, in that it was a broad-spectrum reaction to the depredations of capitalism and industrialism. In colonised territories like North America or Africa, the extinction of species (blaubok, quagga or passenger pigeon) and the settlement of frontiers drove a wave of sentiment for wilderness.  Yet in countries like the UK, conservation had broader roots: the founders of organisations like the National Trust and the RSPB and the Open Spaces Society were people who opposed the impacts of industrial pollution, urban sprawl, hunting and collecting, even if they enjoyed certain of its fruits.

Conservation today is tightly focused, following the fantastic successes of the second half of the twentieth century. The expansion of protected areas is quite remarkable, and the CBD Aichi Targets now propose that they should be extended to 17% of terrestrial and inland water and 10% of coastal and marine areas.  Conservation has become a major global land use.

This version of the story places conservation firmly within a tradition of opposition to industrialised modernity and commerce and development.  According to this narrative, the pioneering middle-class and aristocratic refuseniks of the Victorian and Edwardian era were the forerunners of today’s environmentalists.  But is this true?  Not really.  Environmentalism as a movement in industrialised countries in th