An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema

This article studies the mutual and exclusive relationship between the history of popular Hindi cinema and the writing of the screenplay by finding dominant points of reference in their individual and overlapping histories. It connects the unique storytelling tradition of Hindi cinema with the subsumed creative identity of a screenwriter. To do this the article focuses on significant historical markers in Hindi cinema: the Silent era, the Talkies, the Golden era of the 1950s, the New Wave of the 1960s, the SalimJaved era of the 1970s and the New New Wave of today. The New New Wave in Hindi popular cinema aims to recognize and legitimize the presence of the story and the screenwriter. The article studies the evolution of this recent phenomenon and examines the academic and industrial variants that have led to the coming of this change in Hindi cinema.