The last decade has seen eﬀorts better to commercialize Bengali ﬁlms, with the industry forging corporate ties and eﬀectively tapping the explosion of electronic media for the purposes of publicity and promotion.

It created the paradigm of ‘ﬁlm as art’/‘culture,’ and made the Bengali cinema a project of the educated ‘middle classes,’ the Bengali bhadralok.1 The rupture of the same paradigm of ‘ﬁlm as art’ or a ‘cultured’ entertainment gave Bengali cinema an entirely new conﬁguration after the 1970s, and made room for the existence of very diverse genres and trends of regional cinema. Key to this understanding of Bengali cinema is the idea of ‘cultured Benga- liness,’ which informed the making of a regional culture industry. 4.1 ‘BENGALI’ CINEMA Its making and unmaking Sharmistha Gooptu Introduction This chapter maps the multiple transitions and shifts of Bengali cinema since its inception in the 1920s, tracing the evolution of a particular paradigm of the ﬁlm form leading up to the end of the 1950s, and the unmaking of the same paradigm of ‘Bengali’ cinema since the 1970s, and leading up to the present.

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