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Over the past several years, a number of key Hindi film musicals--prime specimens of Bollywood's consensual Golden Age, roughly the 1950s--have become accessible on DVD. Golden Age titles now available disclose a cinema of astonishing depth, variety, and maturity. The best Golden Age filmmakers felt empowered to pursue the highest kind of artistic excellence in a wholly popular context.

It's zany, extravagant, kitschy. It's delightfully (or fabulously) cheesy (or tacky). It's mad, wild, wacky, over-thetop. Campy. Exotic. Transgressive. Liberating. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Film critics always reach into the same bag of breathless adjectives when trying to sell Bollywood movies to non-- Indian audiences. If the words ring a bell, it's because you're hearing the vocabulary of cult-movie special pleading, equally handy for touting direct-to-video horror, chopsocky extravaganzas, and all-midget musical Westerns. It's the language of bad faith. We use it to hedge our bets when we're not confident that our particular obsessions will stand up to serious critical scrutiny. At the same time, we use it to praise ourselves: Aren't we special for loving this unconventional, demotic, multicultural stuff? And aren't we, well, ever so slightly superior to it?

Some years ago, when I found myself proselytizing for Hindi films in America, I too made use of this idiom, albeit with a certain queasiness about describing a great national cinema in terms cribbed from an Ed Wood user's manual. Then things changed. As Bollywood "went global" in the wake of GATT and WTO, quality suffered terribly. Seemingly overnight, the typical Hindi musical was no longer a giddy, densely layered celebration of difference like Khuda Gawah (God Is My fatness, 92) or Mr. India (87), but a blandly formulaic hymn to the values of the trasnational bourgeoisie, like Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart Is Crazy, 97) or Dil Chahta Hal (The Heart Desires, 01), slickly produced and seasoned with just enough worldbeat exoticism to interest the affluent global audience to which it was now addressed. For the first time, Bollywood was a bore, and the rare exceptions-Mani Ratnam's excoriating political psychodrama Dil Se (From the Heart, 98) or Khalid Mohamed's burnished cri de coeur Fiza (00)-merely proved the rule. In its long-awaited moment of international recognition (or, at any rate, its acknowledgment by high-profile pastiche specialists Baz Lurhmann and Andrew Lloyd Webber), Bollywood no longer seemed worth talking about.

But as global commerce closed a door, it opened a window. Over the past several years, a number of key historical titles-- prime specimens of Bollywood's consensual Golden Age, roughly the Fifties-have become accessible on DVD. The result has been a revelation. No longer is it necessary to extrapolate from shoddy pirated videotapes, indifferently subtitled and brutally cropped, in order to experience Hindi commercial cinema in its prime. Viewed in a reasonable approximation of their original state, films like Mehboob Khan's epic Mother India (57), V. Shantaram's eerily beautiful Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (The Anklet' Jingle, 55), or Guru Dutt's near-sublime Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 59) can now be seen for what they are: landmarks of commercial world cinema, comparable with Holly`wood's most enduring works.

And that's just for starters. Golden Age titles now readily available disclose a cinema of astonishing depth, variety, and maturity. If you're looking for indisputable auteurs, you'll find Guru Dutt's complete oeuvre, ranging from the delightful romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. 55 (55) to Sahib, Bibi Aur Gh alam (Master, Wife, and Serant, 62), an anatomization of sexual politics among Bengal's declining aristocracy. Alternately, you can now compare Bimal Roy's relatively well-known neorealist experiment, Do Bigha Zameen (Two Acres of Land, 53), with his wistful ghost story Madhumati (58) or with Sujata (59), a furious and moving attack on the caste system.

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Comparably distinguished films track the emergence of Bollywood's fabled star system, from the sexually charged early Raj Kapoor/Nargis romances Awaara (Vagabond, 51) and Barsaat (Rain, 49) to bad boy Dilip Kumar's brooding melodramas Amar (55) and Gunga Jumna (61)-not to mention Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal, 60), a majestic historical spectacle that pairs Kumar with the matchless Madhubala (a sort of sub-continental cross between Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman). Other titles-e.g., Mahal (The Mansion, 49), Baiju Bawra (Baiju the Poet, 52), Na',rang (59)-are outstanding especially with respect to music and dance. Scan the shelves at your nearest South Asian video parlor-the options are almost overwhelming.

These are ambitious, fully fleshed, technically masterful popular artworks, for which no kind of apology is necessary. Zany? Extravagant? Kitschy? Only to people for whom the past is a foreign country and a foreign country past understanding.

To speak of a Golden Age, however, clearly implies something more meaningful than a long list of good movies. While every decade has its high points and its passionate defenders, Fifties films are held in particular esteem by Indian fans and critics, who find in them qualities generally absent from more recent Bollywood productions. On the other hand, no one seems quite certain what these qualities were or where they came from. As one bewildered fan puts it on his web page: "Somehow a confluence of circumstances seems to have come together and given birth to a kind of magic serendipity in the mid-Forties . . . and somehow, even though many of the same major figures continued to work in the industry, that magic coming together seems to have largely dissipated in the Sixties."

In fact, magic had nothing to do with it and serendipity very little. Putting aside nostalgia and the vagaries of individual taste, I think that the distinguishing features of Fifties cinema can be identified and located in the social and commercial realities of post-colonial India. To see why, we'll need to take a quick look back at the context in which the Golden Age developed.

In the aftermath of Independence, India found herself wrestling with the lingering effects of multiple traumas. A broad consensus had arisen on a number of domestic issues: communalism (Hindu-Muslim hatred) had to be stamped out, a goal made especially urgent by the mass bloodletting that accompanied Partition; poverty needed to be remedied through programs of agrarian reform and industrialization; social "backwardness," especially as it affected women and lower-caste Indians, had to be eradicated. Nehru's left-center coalition, which was to frame the ruling Congress Party's agenda for years to come, made nation-building the order of the day. This was to be a pan-Indian project, inspired by Nehru's charisma and relying on revolutionary energies left over from the Freedom Movement. Every sector of society was invited to contribute. Film workers, many of them Movement veterans, enthusiastically threw themselves into the struggle. Raj Kapoor later remembered the period as "an age of optimism. The republic was new, the rulers were new to leadership. My cinema was born in an age of idealism."

As it happened, this spirit of civic voluntarism coincided with a crisis in the film industry. By the late Forties, Bombay's highly developed studio system had been decimated by wartime inflation and production restrictions. War profiteering funneled large sums of "black money" into the industry, and power reverted to stars, who in their newfound independence were able to command salaries that studios couldn't afford. As early as 1951, the national Film Enquiry Commission found that most films were already being financed through one-shot deals between financiers and freelance producers.

The effect of these chaotic conditions was surprisingly salutary. Until the mid-Sixties, when distributor-financiers consolidated their power and began to drive down quality, fly-by-night moneymen were content to keep their hands off day-to-day production so long as a respectable profit was in the cards; meanwhile, key personnel were liberated from onerous studio contracts. Thus producers-especially when backed by powerful stars-were able to assemble highly skilled creative teams and grant them an unprecedented degree of artistic freedom.

As a result, Bollywood became a magnet for talent. As refugees from ravaged Bengal poured into town during the late Forties, the film industry received an infusion of creative energy from the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) and the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), influential cultural groups affiliated with the Communist Party and embracing virtually every important artist of the era. Prominent among the IPTA veterans who moved into commercial cinema were directors Bimal Roy, K.A. Abbas, and Ritwik Ghatak; actors Prithviraj Kapoor, Durga Khote, and Balraj Sahni; musicians Salil Chaudhary and Hemant Kumar, and lyricists Shailendra, Sahir Ludhianvi, and Kaifi Azmi. Others without formal ties to IPTA or the Party were nevertheless instinctive and passionate leftists (like director/producer Mehboob Khan, whose studio logo incorporated the hammer and sickle). To them, the Bollywood scene was pregnant with artistic and political opportunity; Ghatak was not alone in expecting that "a truly national cinema will emerge from the much abused form of melodrama when truly serious and committed artists will bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it."

Engendered by this unique coincidence of ideological confidence and industrial disarray, a species of committed commercial cinema briefly flourished in the midst of mercenary Bombay. Message films were in vogue, some of which-like Raj Kapoor's Shri 420 (Mr. 420, 55)-had moments of preachiness and sentimentality that don't hold up well today, particularly given the eventual collapse of the Congress Party's social promises. But most consciously political films refrained from any programmatic endorsement of Nehruvian reconstruction. On the contrary, mainstream melodrama often became a vehicle for radical social critique, particularly as disillusionment began setting in towards the decade's end.

In the opening sequence of Mehboob's Mother India, for example, the aged peasant Radha (Nargis) is summoned by Congress functionaries to bless a newly constructed irrigation canal-- and, by implication, Nehru's Community Development and Rural Extension Program, a mid-Fifties Ford Foundation initiative aimed at undercutting Communism's appeal to the rural poor. But the final shot invites a very different reading: as Radha watches, the water pouring from the sluice gates turns blood-red, evoking the deaths of three of her children, the crippling of her husband, and more generally the relentless physical misery that is the price of farming under feudalism. The sequence, like the film as a whole, dramatizes social ills far more deeply rooted than anything mere reformism would seem able to address. In similar fashion, Guru Dutt would challenge the nation to live up to its professed ideals in Pyaasa (The Thirsty One, 57), in which the poet-protagonist's tour of Calcutta's sordid brothel district is coupled with stinging lines from Sahir Ludhianvi's poem Chakle (Brothels): "Jinhen naaz hai Hind par woh kahaan hai?" ("Those who take pride in India, where are they?")

Relatively few films, to be sure, were overtly political. Entertaining the broadest possible audience was critical to boxoffice success, and the basic elements of the Bollywood masala film (music, dance, comedy, romance, and family melodrama) took shape during this period. Yet the freedom struggle was never far from consciousness-it was, in the words of film historian Gautam Kaul, "always in the air...as if the colour of life itself"-and so apparently superficial entertainments were nevertheless deeply informed by issues of social reconstruction and national identity. That's why the Dev Anand detective story Kala Pan (Lie Imprisonment, 58) turns out to be a thinly disguised allegory that pits its enlightened hero against recalcitrant feudalism; it's also why the ghosts that haunt Madhumati force a confrontation with repressed memories of historical injustice (specifically, the violent dispossession of tribal peoples by emergent capitalism).

Aesthetic choices, too, were shaped by political idealism. Because Islamic forms of music, dance, and poetry are woven into the very fabric of Golden Age films, regardless of subject matter, an implicit but powerful anti-communalist stance is unmistakably assumed. Muslim characters, meanwhile, are never figured as The Other, let alone the enemy, but are treated as naturally integral to Indian life. Even the critique of purdah-the veiling and seclusion of women-in the "Muslim social" Chaudhvin Ka Chand (Moon of the Fourteenth Night, 60) is clearly meant to address an Indian problem; in other respects Indo-Islamic culture is embraced and celebrated, notably in the opening song "Yeh Lucknow Ki Sarzameen" ("This Land of Lucknow"). The normative effect at work here is arguably more powerful than overt propaganda ever could be.

Nor were social progress and artistic excellence regarded as incompatible goals. Nehruvian liberals and IPTA leftists alike perceived a pressing need to rebuild, even reinvent, a rich cultural heritage that had been devastated by colonialism and Partition. Elevating the artistic content of commercial cinema was therefore viewed as a political end in itself. On the occasion of Bollywood's Silver Jubilee festivities in 1956, the governor of the state of Bihar charged the industry with "diving into the very soul of India, [making al deep study of the all-sided as well as varied culture of this great land [with] full utilization of colour and poetry that is profuse and inherent in the Indian scene, developing technical skill on all fronts and, above all, [with] high idealism."

What's striking about these remarks in retrospect is that they were addressed to commercial filmmakers. Within two decades, as the government-sponsored "Parallel Cinema" entered its brief period of prominence, only art-house directors (Ray, Benegal, Gopalakrishnan, et al.) would be asked to carry the torch for cultural uplift; Bolly-wood would effectively be written off as a fantasy machine for the poor. During the Fifties, however, the great rift between bourgeois art cinema and mass entertainment-kicked off by the international succes d'estime of Pather Panchali and the attendant cult of Satyajit Ray-still lay in the future. Neither filmmakers nor filmgoers acknowledged any bright line between high and low; critics had yet to advise them that mass culture needed to be meretricious in order to be successful.

Consequently, the best Golden Age filmmakers felt empowered to pursue the highest kind of artistic excellence in a wholly popular context. Elements of folk art, classical tradition, and Western modernity could be blended with a free hand; highflown verse could exist side-- by-side with Hollywood-style narrative strategies. (Audiences didn't seem to mind: Karimuddin Asif's Mughal-e-- Azam-scripted in a self-consciously poetic Urdu that's about as close to colloquial Hindi as Shakespeare is to the evening news-was a nationwide smash.) At times these films display a degree of aesthetic complexity that eluded even Hollywood in its heyday-a near-total integration of music, language, and visual meaning, painstakingly wrought and sensually stunning. This happens most obviously in "song picturizations" (musical sequences), where typically, as critic Partha Chatterjee has written, "were hidden the film's message: the director's true intentions."

For an especially vivid example, you could do no better than to screen the "Waqt ne kiya" song sequence from Guru Dutt's Kaagaz Ke Phool. Equally evocative of The Bad and the Beautiful, Citizen Kane, and PC. Barua's seminal apotheosis of romantic masochism, Devdas (35), this tortured, semi-autographical melodrama tells the story of a film director destroyed by the conflicting imperatives of sex, family, and commerce. It is both an affecting romance and an intricate, exquisitely calculated palimpsest that alludes freely to Urdu and Bengali literature as well as Bombay cinematic history, industry lore, and real-life scandal. As in Hollywood's better movie-- movies, the interplay of artifice and reality is a central preoccupation. Dutt himself plays director/alter ego Suresh, who is in the midst of filming a remake of Devdas; his leading lady, Shanti, is played by Dutt's real-life protege Waheeda Rehman.

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The "Waqt ne kiya" sequence unfolds as Shanti and Suresh find themselves alone on a shadowy soundstage after a day's shooting. (This set is rendered in prodigious depth and detail by cinematographer V.K. Murthy, who contrives the impression that a single brilliant shaft of natural light, slanting from ceiling to floor, is the sole source of illumination.) During five minutes of elegant montage, the characters neither speak nor touch. Yet it's made quite clear that Suresh and Shanti have committed themselves to an adulterous love affair, even as they apprehend its inevitably disastrous conclusion.

The scene is well remembered in India, primarily because the accompanying song has achieved a life of its own on radio and audiotape. Wedded to a solemn, haunting melody by S.D. Burman, the lyric (originally in the rich literary Urdu of poet Kaifi Azmi, here translated by Ziauddin Sardar) simultaneously summarizes the narrative and elaborates its themes:

Time has inflicted great cruelty on us.

You are no longer yourself,

I am no longer myself.

I can think of no place to go now;

I would walk away but no path is open to me.

What do I seek? The answer escapes me.

I cannot stop my heart from weaving a tapestry of dreams.

The words are resonant in themselves, but Dutt's handling of the sequence creates additional levels of meaning through a deliberate conjunction of lyric, sound, and image. In the scene's essential moment, Rehman's face is at first lit harshly from below, creating the starting effect of a mask or corpse. (Rest assured that no Bollywood movie queen, let alone the great Waheeda, was ever lit so unforgivingly before or since.) As she walks slowly toward a visibly agonized Dutt, her face slips briefly into darkness, and then re-emerges-- utterly transformed. She is now seen under classic Hollywood glamour lighting, her beauty rehabilitated by the comforting illusion of depth. Owing to movie magic, she once again seems "real."

It's one of the most remarkable lighting effects I've ever seen, but there's more: it is synched, with consummate shrewdness, to the song; specifically, to the phrase "Hum rahe naa hum" ("I am no longer myself"). In this context, Azmi's line is heard not simply as a conventional expression of love's transformative power: rather, it is subsumed and transfigured by Dutt's critique of cinematic artifice and the dehumanizing effects of celebrity. At the same time, the lyric illuminates the inner lives of the characters, underscoring Suresh's fatal inability to distinguish between Shanti and the star image he has fashioned for her. Add to this a healthy dose of dramatic irony-Rehman and Dutt were widely rumored to be reallife lovers; the song is dubbed by his wife, Geeta Dutt-and you've got a moment that's almost infinitely suggestive.

This exemplary piece of Fifties filmmaking is what Indian cinephiles have in mind when they speak of a Golden Age. It would be easy to list more of them. But that would be missing the point. What's really remarkable about the era is not so much its towering peaks of artistic achievement, as the surprisingly high ground that surrounds them. Acknowledged masterworks aside, even the now-accessible run-of-the-mill A-pictures-from histrionic crime melos to assembly-line star vehicles-consistently exhibit qualities that were to become rare as hen's teeth in subsequent decades: literate dialogue, superior song lyrics, first-rate music and dance, intelligent cinematography, and a kind of star power that feels organic rather than mass-produced. And that, perhaps, is the best evidence for a plausible Golden Age-not an era when giants walked the earth, but a time when, due to complex but identifiable historical circumstances, typical mainstream films were made with great craftsmanship and animated by a spirit of idealism.

The language of idealism is of course profoundly unfashionable in this era of post-modern sophistication, but in Fifties India it helped to create a better kind of cinema. For a time, it may also have helped to preserve a better world. Golden Age films did not conquer self-interest or religious hatred, but they undoubtedly contributed to an ideological atmosphere in which the worst excesses of greed and communalism could be more easily denounced and resisted.

Look at it this way: In 1959 the earnest "social" Dhool Ka Phool (Flowers of the Dust, 59) appeared, a sentimental but intermittently powerful melodrama about the victimization of illegitimate children. Ironically, this was the directorial debut of talented hack Yash Chopra, a professional synthesizer of the zeitgeist who was later to give us the excruciating Dil To Pagal Hat. Yet, in keeping with the spirit of the times, Dhool Ka Phool featured an unforgettable anti-- communalist lyric by Sahir Ludhianvi:

You shall be neither a Hindu nor a Muslim.

You are the child of a human being A human being you shall be.

By contrast, Bollywood's biggest hit of 2001 was the cynical, openly communalist Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Rebellion: A Love Story), which flattered BJP ideologues by painting Indian Muslims as a Fifth Column in league with Pakistan. As I write, the crypto-fascist fantasies of Gadar et al. are being played out in the cities and villages of Gujarat, where organized gangs of Hindu thugs are exacting a terrible blood price for the Godhra train massacre. In this case, we might like to pretend there's no connection between the import of popular culture and the realities of human experience. But we would be wrong.

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