Contemporary Bengali cinema is in the throes of a crisis from which it is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future. The commercial films are a poor copy of their Hindi and Telugu counterparts, without their raw energy or production resources. Hindi cinema has an all-India audience, and Telugu too has a much larger audience than Bengali; besides, producers from Hyderabad also finance Hindi versions of the original. A film is generally seen as a product packaged for as wide a sale as