The Epic Melodrama schism between mainstream Gandhian nationalism and the private sector that emerged during the war, the language of the S.K. Patil Report also inaugurates two specific attitudes to film. The first, that commercial cinema has had a major influence in lowering or corrupting audience taste because of the kind of capital 56 that flowed into it; and second, that a distinction should be made between a serious, good, parallel, art cinema on the one hand—and this cinema inevitably claimed realist intent—and the less acceptable lower form of mass culture represented by the rest, on the other. This was the first conscious nationalist evocation in cinema of what we know to be characteristic of post-war modernism in Europe, a modernism that 'constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture' (Huyssen, 1986). Sumit Sarkar defines the larger political characteristics of the class that, for me, adhered to the greatest extent to these attitudes: a dependent colonial bourgeoisie inhibited by 'relations of dependence and collaboration with British rule and colonial capital'—and its filmic counterpart, the fact that realism too was a borrowed tool, representing the contestatory cultural aspirations of this class, rather than any mirror held up to reality—'close connections with pre-capitalist forms of exploitation of the small producer through rent, usury and trade'—and thus the chronic locating of this realism in the Indian village, borrowing the paradigms for its morality conflicts mainly from rural stereotypes, the villainous zamindar and the good peasant (an all-India phenomenon)—'fear of an already fairly militant working class'—in my terms, the conflict with, and need to assimilate, the realism of the radical avant-garde pioneered by the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association— 'as well as the lack of cultural hegemony in so far as there was little permeation of bourgeois values throughout societ/ (Sarkar 1983). The political aspect of this formulation is of course, by now, fairly clear; I would like to make its filmic connections in the following ways. 1. That realism was one of the key sites of a major cultural hegemony in cinema, as various approaches to it defined state policy on film after independence. A modernist realism (modernist mainly in the high-low sense) attempted, therefore, to extend bourgeois values in Indian society, in conflict with a Nehruvian socialist-realism of the sort that, for example, influenced the central documentary wing, the Films Division, and the iconography with which it characterised the freedom struggle; and an avant-garde realism, pioneered mainly by former affiliates of the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association, which often differed fundamentally with the Indian state on its typical image of its own nationalist identity and its cultural agenda. 2. That the primary political battle was assimilated at a secondary level by most of India's commercial cinemas, who in equating realism with certain objectified values and symbols (e.g., of 'rationality', 'science' or 'historicity') also wrought what in retrospect would be the far more significant change in Indian film: the shift from the reformist social (including in this the indigenous mythological and the more borrowed historical), into an idiom of melodrama. Journal of Arts & Ideas