Widescreen

The buzz about Slumdog Millionaire has people talking about Indian films again. To those who care about international cinema, this seems like a good thing. It raises awareness; it provokes debate. The only problem is that, to my ear, the discussion itself sounds tinny.

Bollywood is invariably stereotyped by the west, while Indian cinema as a whole is poorly understood. Depending on who you ask, Slumdog either captures the tragic exhilaration of Mumbai or cheapens it; its depiction of Mumbai's massive Dharavi slums is either precisely accurate or hopelessly out-of-date. Yet Indian film, and its relationship to the real world, is a richer, stranger beast than all of this suggests. I'm in Delhi at the moment and, in the last 24 hours, have met two legendary figures whose work shows why and how.

The first, the director Mani Kaul, came to my bed-and-breakfast as the sun set and turquoise parrots played in the trees. I've admired him for years. His 1969 movie Uski Roti helped to launch the new Indian cinema of the 1970s. He has taught at CalArts in LA, at Duke University and at Harvard, and has won the most prestigious award in Hindi cinema, the Filmfare critics' award, four times. Yet the elegant, greying, smiling man who sat down at my table carried his achievements lightly.

The opening sequence of Uski Roti (in which the actress Garima is pictured, right) shows why "parallel cinema," as art films are called in India, is so significant. We see the leaves of a tree. A stone is thrown. It hits a guava. This falls to the ground. A man lifts it and gives a woman a bite. Western viewers will immediately think of Eden and Newton, but Kaul's visionary style points elsewhere. Each shot seems to arrive too early. There a pause between the guava being hit and it falling, a pause when it should, by rights, have started to move. This is a non-Newtonian universe: a place where reality comes second to something else. Kaul explains it to me: he is not interested in making us identify with individuals in his movies. He wants to create a broader sense of what existence is. Mentioning the great Hindu mystical texts, the Upanishads, he talks about human connectivity: the idea that the ego puts barbed wire between people. Such ideas were popularised in the west by Schopenhauer and Yeats, among others, but it is rare and winning to find a filmmaker who sees that how people are framed and how they glance at each other from one frame to the next—across the cut, as it were—has philosophical implications. This is one reason why the best of Asian cinema has a different sense of action and repose, of the individual and the group, to that of the west. Deep in Asian culture, the thinking is different.

That was yesterday. Today, I met the actress Sharmila Tagore, sometimes called the Elizabeth Taylor of Indian cinema. It's a nickname that oversimplifies her status. Yes, she is the kind of movie star who gets mobbed in the street and whose elegant style was copied by thousands of young Indian women in the 1960s and 1970s. But she began her career in Bengali art cinema and—when she subsequently began to act in the Hindi mainstream—spoke with a strong accent, much like Ingrid Bergman. While still in her teens, she was cast by the master director Satyajit Ray in the third of his award winning trilogy of Apu films, Apur Sansar (1959), which tells the story of a young Bengali man's life in the early 20th century. After this debut, Ray then cast her in his controversial anti-clerical 1960 movie Devi. Cinematically, Devi is like a Mughal miniature: an exquisite microcosm of fine details in which the director tells the story of a beautiful 17-year-old girl who is labelled a goddess after a vision by her father-in-law. Ray, parallel cinema's standard bearer, directed Tagore to fill her acting with innumerable small pauses, creating a performance that The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael declared was "perfect."

Tagore tells me that the most noticeable difference between parallel and mainstream Indian cinema is that the latter does not allow pauses. Its storytelling, its acting, its editing, its romance—everything must be kept moving. To western eyes the musical numbers of mainstream Bollywood films can seem like longeurs, but they are more like a cinematic hyperactive, generating constant activity. Yet, as Tagore tells me, the line between Indian art and entertainment cinema has long been blurred. Even the classics of the 1940s and 1950s had an eye on the social as well as the escapist. And, whether it's a falling fruit or a dance routine, Indian cinema cannot be understood without regard to the ticking clock. Sharmila's distant relative the poet Rabindranath Tagore once said that art is a dewdrop in which life is reflected. In Delhi, in two remarkable people, I feel I've seen the best of Indian cinema reflected and burnished.