Small is successful

Award season breeds recaps,and the nominations by Screen an Express Group publication show its been a good year for Hindi cinema,one in which it placed ever more mirrors to change. There was,after all,someone called Natha a frail,bearded man with hollow eyes and holding a goat in a corner of Peepli gaon who became the unlikely hero of Bollywood 2010. Small became significant in more ways than one. Bollywood of Maneesh Sharma Band Baaja Baaraat and Vikramaditya Motwane Udaan left designer Mumbai,the sequinned city that lived only in the imagination of the few,and sought out the charm and,equally,the charmlessness of middle India,the bylanes of Janakpuri and the steel plants of Jamshedpur.

Just scroll down the list of nominations for directing: there are three newcomers on a list of six Anusha Rizvi,Motwane and Sharma. None of the six directors,the other three being Prakash Jha,Dibakar Banerjee and Milan Luthria,features a big Khan on their star cast. Instead,you find,alongside Natha,a Delhi University chap called Bittoo Singh and a 17-year-old called Rohan. Bollywood did not just celebrate this new; they made money out of it as well,out of Peepli Live and Love Sex Aur Dhokha. Films that would have been once quietly confined to the niche of art-house cinema celebrated yet seldom viewed were this time unapologetically mainstreamed. The year marked a huge departure even for the champion of chiffon-in-Switzerland. In Band Baaja Baaraat,Yash Raj Films turned a corner and found itself in a Delhi market. Unlike its previous excursion to middle India in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year,this time it found both crowds and cash.

Popular culture,by its very definition,captures the Zeitgeist. And Hindi cinema has always done it in its own way with colour,excess,and noise. It has also adapted and incorporated new techniques,and over the years its blurred the false divide between mainstream and meaningful cinema. Last year,it found satire in 24215;7 media,and used new media,the digital format,to take a raw,gritty look at rural and urban change in a more pixellated way. 2010 was the year the small held its own on the big screen.