Most of your designs are a tongue-in-cheek perspective of the Bollywood world. Why have you chosen to present Bollywood in such a way? Hand-painted Bollywood (popular Hindi cinema) movie posters are as distinct as the genre they promote. In fact, it’s difficult to believe this form of advertising wasn’t used to publicise the earliest movies made in India. When the country’s first feature film, Raja Harishchandra, was screened one hundred years ago at Mumbai’s Coronation Cinema, announcements in the prestigious Times of India publicised the event. Even on the release of India’s first sound film, Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani, 1931), the screening was promoted with text-based handbills and newspaper adverts, as was the norm among theatre companies of the time.

Irna Qureshi traces the history and meaning of a fascinating variety of movie marketing: the unique, hand-painted Bollywood poster. Film producers had their own priorities for poster design. They wanted the poster to act as a safety net. It had to offer value for money by appearing to be all things to all people. Thus, the movie had to appeal to as many different segments of society as possible by offering comedy, romance, action and melodrama all on one poster, as a promise of the different ingredients the film contained. And so, rather than highlighting the most compelling image to offer one strong key message, some producers preferred to consolidate every highlight from the film. This inevitably made the posters seem cluttered, as did showing the main character in different guises. Yet, the lure of variety was deemed to make it appeal to many different markets simultaneously. Following the demise of the studio system in the 1970s, independent workshops such as Jolly Art Studio, Kalarath and Om Studio were established to cater exclusively for the film industry. Between them, these workshops employed around 200 artists to paint their posters and banners. The employees were usually self-taught, learning their craft from senior artists before setting up on their own. Incidentally, one of India’s best known artists, M F Hussain, famously began his creative career as a painter of Bollywood film posters.

About Us

Some examples from the posters are, just a simple glass of orange juice and a carom board for Munnabhai MBBS. Or an old rustic telephone for Hera – Pheri. In my viewpoint, a poster needs a clearly defined purpose to eliminate any confusion from the start by having a single, strong focal point. And for the world to see, its fresh, clutter breaking and ahead of its times.

The posters will continue to be designed with each new suggestion that I can manage to execute with perfection or whatever comes close until I find other genres to espouse it with.” Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (Reaktion Books, 2002) While the language of Bollywood is intelligible to a broad audience when spoken, the unique writing systems for Urdu and Hindi make their scripts mutually exclusive. This is another reason to keep Bollywood posters so light on text; a quote or tagline in one script would exclude large parts of the audience, particularly in rural centres. Conversely, the film’s title on the poster for the epic Mughal-e-Azam appears in three different scripts—Hindi, Urdu and English—to attract the largest audience possible. Mughal-e-Azam The procedure begins with stripping the object down to its bare essentials and then a handful of colours, shapes and positive/negative space convey the basic idea around which the movie was originally made. All but the essential. Historically, film posters have used language quite strategically. Text was kept to a minimum to accommodate the low levels of literacy when trying to appeal to a mass audience. Part of Bollywood’s appeal is its universal language, which traverses religious and regional boundaries to make films accessible to a broad multilingual audience. For instance, two of India’s major languages, Hindi and Urdu, are regarded as sister tongues, sharing a large common vocabulary. Bollywood films tend to use a colloquial blend of these, and increasingly a mix of Hindi, Urdu and English (known as Hinglish) which makes the films intelligible to speakers of several languages and dialects. It is for this reason that Bollywood is so popular among a wide British Asian audience; whether they’re Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, and regardless of mother tongue, the language of Bollywood brings them together.

Akshar has a tendency to bring out one iconic scene or image to represent each film. He brings a fresh set of eyes to the Bollywood world. The resulting impact is extraordinary.