BOLLYWOOD is not the only type of cinema to have emerged from India - there is also a strong tradition of Art cinema, and one of its trend-setters is Kumar Shahani, 57, who has been a visiting film-maker at Napier University in Edinburgh over the past term.
Shahani is very much a lone wolf with firm ideas about film. His debut feature, Maya Darpan (Mirror of Illusion), from 1972, focuses on a woman who rebels against a feudal background and explores her sexuality.
Not only was the subject matter controversial, stylistically, too, he was challenging cinema conventions, something he continues to explore. For example, a story is rarely told from one point of view. The use of time and place is governed according to the rhythms of other Indian art forms, such as painting or poetry. Shahani uses the concept of ''zeroness'', a term borrowed from Buddhism, to explain his way of film-making - the exact location of the zero changes the meaning.
Shahani is following in the footsteps of his teacher and mentor Ritwik Ghatak, by creating an Indian cinema which tells the truth about its reality and takes from its own artistic traditions to put that across. Ghatak, a contemporary of Satyajit Ray but not as well known, is seen as the godfather of Indian ''realist cinema'' in the mould of its Italian counterpart.
Shahani, who used to run a film society in Bombay which screened French New Wave films, previewed a film by Ghatak and was hooked. ''Here was a man drawing on the resources of India such as family, day-to-day living, culture, and making movies,'' he recalls.
He enrolled at the Film & Television Institute of India in Pune, in western India, where he became Ghatak's favourite pupil. Shahani later taught there and is remembered by many students because of his unrelenting passion for cinema.
He argues that cinema is the most important art form because of its sympathy with any kind of experience and language. ''It can reach the kind of abstraction that music has,'' he says. ''It is totally sensuous.''
An example of this is Bhavantarana (Permanent Imminence), from 1991, whose screening tomorrow at the GFT will be attended by Shahani. The film is a portrait of one of India's greatest living dancers, Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, and deals with the tradition of that dance. The idea is to show how one art form - in this case dance - can be transposed to another form - film.
As a young man, he won a scholarship to study at the Film School in Paris and participated in the 1968 student protests. He admired Robert Bresson, sought him out, and worked on his Une Femme Douce (1969).
Shahani's Scottish sojourn has also had a profound effect on him. He has been up most nights, glass of whisky in hand, gazing at the stars. ''It's the light,'' he marvels. ''It is constantly changing. It kindles an almost animal desire to live.''
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