We have had some high quality Indian movies post 1947, in fact the ratio of good to bad was quite decent even till the 70s. Then something happened, the number of bad movies just multiplied dozen fold and kept getting worse and worse every passing year. Even today there are a few young film makers making excellent movies but all of that is overshadowed by the nonsense generated by the bigger production houses. How can a young director continue to push the creative boundaries when his/her product isn't finding the market? No wonder the creative juices are drying up among the younger breed and they are forced to be mediocre and thus more in tune with the easily content, mediocre masses. I won't blame education or IQ for this downfall because you had Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt churning out masterpieces in an era when our education/literacy levels were much worse than today. Even till recent times the local Bengali and Malayalam industries had creative, thought provoking movies but alas even the final frontiers have been breached by the dark forces. Now there is a spark in Tamil Nadu where experimental film makers are making good, low budget movies and also have some takers.....let us see how long this movement lasts but I have a pessimistic outlook.
I think more than anything our people have no taste, this applies even to the rich. May be in the initial years after Independence there was some carryover effect of the British Raj. Unlike many South Asians I think the British rule had some positive effect on India. They taught us manners, they brought modern technology to our landmass, they brought education/medicine to the ignorant Indians, they brought in the concept of sports, they brought an end to social evils prevalent in our society, they taught us to have a rational outlook. Not just that they helped us realize our own past, without British archeologists we would never have known about the Harappan civilization or most things about our ancient past. Doesn't matter whether we were a mighty force once upon a time or not, when the Europeans came we were at our nadir and needed them to get us out of the hole and usher our civilization to modernity. Even in arts, culture, literature the Brits revived what we had lost over the centuries. They also happened to teach us cinema and exposed us to all the tools of cinema making. I believe our initial success in film making was courtesy the experience under the British. When that generation died out we started returning to our basic instincts which had been tempered for so long under the boots of the white sahibs. Think about who our greatest minds have been in the last 100 years? Ramanujam, CV Raman, Abdus Salam, Subramanyam Chandrasekhar, Har Gobind Khorana, Iqbal, Mr Jinnah, Nehru, Ambedkar, Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen, Mahbub Ul Huq......all are from a time when they spent their formative years under British institutions. This after effect lasted for about 20 years post independence, after that it was back to our native roots. It is no coincidence that we have stopped producing great minds on our shores because we are incapable of innovation, we can't stimulate creativity here, we don't challenge our excellence here. Most (if not all) of the Indians and Pakistanis who have achieved something on the creative front have been from Western institutions. Same set of people with similar DNA, culture and roots are mechanized robots in one place and they shape the future of the world in another place (winning Nobel Prize, Abel Prize, Fields Medal etc on the way), go figure. Since I am a chess fan I can share an anecdote by 5 time World Champion Viswanathan Anand. He had once come to my college for a talk and in his interaction with students said he improved his game outside India. As a youngster he lived for a while in Philippines and made a great leap in his playing strength. Later in the 90s when he was at his peak and had to fight with great rivals like Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik etc he made a conscious decision to shift base to Spain leaving his old parents alone in Chennai. The only reason he did this was because he felt playing in India in local tournaments, interacting with other Indian GMs etc was stifling his creativity and making him complacent. He needed to shift his base at the age of 26 to Europe because the environment there was better suited to unleash his creative potential, now if that isn't a damning indictment on India, don't know what is. Only after he accomplished what he always dreamt of, winning multiple titles did he return back to Chennai and when he returned he was a 42 year old homesick man with nothing left to prove to anyone. His playing strength suffered a great dip post 2012 but aside from advancing age his shift to India too is a valid reason for his decline.
With passing time the British institutions (that serve us till date) are slowly dying and we have proved to be incapable of coming up with better alternatives. The one thing that we had so long was the time tested robust British era system passed on to us post 1947 and we are destroying it. Once that link collapses I see darker days ahead.
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