A Decade After Masaan: The Rise of OTT and the Fall of Indie Cinema’s Hope

Is cinema now dead?

Last week, The Indian Express asked me to write on Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, which just turned ten. This version is longer edition of the one that published for IE. It traces memory, a particular moment in cinema, and what changed since.

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Masaan, the cult classic, just turned ten, and it took me down memory lane. Back in 2011, I had randomly DMed Neeraj Ghaywan on Twitter, saying I wanted to work in the film industry but was confused. I must have had an egg DP on my profile and was an absolute nobody back then. To my surprise, Neeraj, who was then assisting Anurag Kashyap on Gangs of Wasseypur, replied. He gave me his number and asked me to call. I still remember that conversation. He told me he had quit a well-paying job, worked 15 hours a day as an AD, and barely earned anything. I joined this industry a bit too late. You’re in your early 20s, so it’s the best time to come here, he said.

Four years later, Masaan premiered at Cannes. Neeraj cried during the standing ovation. And I remembered that voice on the phone: uncertain, worn out, yet still chasing cinema as if all the answers to life’s quiet miseries lay hidden in moving images, flickering in the dark, hypnotising strangers in silence.

I called him again this morning and asked him if there was also a kind of ghost that follows; of having made an excellent first film that people love so deeply, it creates pressure and uncertainty about whether you’ll ever be able to deliver something like that again. Neeraj, in these ten years, made a few short films and directed for OTT platforms, but his next feature, Homebound, is finally set to release this year.

To which he replied:

I don’t really feel the pressure to live up to the success of my previous work. I’m tormented more by my own self: searching for meaning and expression that always seems to elude me. After Masaan, many producers and collaborators expressed interest, but the truth is, I wasn’t sure myself what I wanted to say next. There’s no single reason why I choose a story. It’s probably a combination: a need for self-expression, a worldview I can align with, stories that challenge me, and characters that push me to explore the world anthropologically.

To understand how Masaan was made ten years ago and how someone like Neeraj could be so afflicted with the desire to make films that he gave up everything for it—you have to look at the kind of cinema that surrounded him. Around that time, Indian cinema was undergoing a small, silent rebellion.

Films like Udaan, Black Friday, Court, Gangs of Wasseypur, The Lunchbox, Ankhon Dekhi, Miss Lovely, Fandry, Sulemani Keeda, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, were made in that era. The idea of the independent film had begun to feel less imported. Its charm was now so persuasive that even Ekta Kapoor, the architect of Indian television’s Saas-Bahu new wave, financed Love Sex aur Dhokha.

It was as if the big mall of Bollywood had started allowing a few local vendors to set up carts inside. Between the giant showrooms of Shoppers Stop and Zara, you could now find someone selling handmade accessories or embroidered jholas.

Masaan landed at the perfect moment. So many films were being made then, and so many were quietly buried before they could find birth in the darkness of a theatre or in the waiting rooms of Aaram Nagar, Versova, and Andheri West.

What made Masaan stand out was that it managed to walk a line most films stumble on. It had the quiet ambition to merge arthouse sensibility with the storytelling pace of narrative cinema that remains accessible. At the time, that was unusual. It wasn’t loud in its portrayal of caste, the way some films are when they want their virtue clearly visible. Nor was it so subtle, like much of arthouse cinema, that the idea melted into metaphor and escaped notice altogether.

Masaan treated caste as a sadness that sits at the centre of love stories in India. It carried the kind of melancholy woven into the daily life of this society, the kind that lingers long after grief is supposed to end. Unlike the films and TV shows that came later and kickstarted the ‘small town’ wave, Masaan didn’t romanticise or exoticise the hinterland. There were no peppy background tracks layered with Spanish guitar to sell the charm of the heartland. The town in Masaan breathed, burned, and its people simply waited for something better, with no promise that it would come.

In that sense, Masaan offered a solid template for what Bollywood could produce: a film rooted in Indian reality, with a hint of arthouse, and yet accessible to a wide audience. Even in India, where many viewers may not be used to so-called 'festival films', Masaan found resonance.

The recent film All We Imagine as Light by Payal Kapadia comes to mind. It too walks that delicate line between arthouse and narrative cinema, managing a theatrical release and being embraced by many. Like Masaan, it proves that this bridge can be built, just not very often.

Even this film had songs, which are often considered taboo for any film that aspires to go to festivals. I asked Varun Grover who is the writer and lyricist of Masaan about it. One thing I’ve always found striking about Masaan is its use of music. In most films that are seen as festival-bound or ‘serious cinema,’ songs with lyrics are avoided, or when they appear, the lyrics are minimal and vague. Masaan makes a confident choice to go the other way. Songs like Mann Kasturi Re are built with precise craftsmanship and metaphor, carrying the emotional weight of classic Hindi film poetry.

I asked if there was ever hesitation about how these songs might sit with the film’s tone or how they might land with an international audience, since so much of the poetry risks being lost in translation.

Varun replied:

Hindi poetry is such a big part of life growing up in the North—UP, Bihar, the Hindi belt. Poetry and shayari are everywhere. People associate it with maturity, but its most passionate fans are between sixteen and twenty-two. We never saw that reflected in films. Even in North Indian cinema, you rarely see a boy and girl talk about poetry or books. So we gave that to Shalu’s character, and through her, Deepak starts discovering its beauty.

The film even opens with a complex line: Zindagi kya hai, anasir mein zahoor-e-tarteeb, Maut kya hai inhi ajzaa ka pareshan hona. (What is life? The manifestation of order among elements. What is death? The scattering of those very components.)

That sets the tone: it’s a film about poetry and life. Sadhya ji reads Vinod Kumar Shukla. These were conscious efforts to bring in that literary density. As a first-time filmmaker, you’re more ambitious, and no one stops you. That’s changed now.

My fear wasn’t that people wouldn’t understand the lyrics, it was the opposite. I worried the songs would feel too light. So I added more density. In Mann Kasturi, we used lines like ‘naache ho ke phirki lattoo’. When we first shared Tu Kisi Rail Si Guzarti Hai, some who didn’t know Dushyant Kumar felt it sounded mechanical, not romantic. But those who knew the poem understood. My fear was always: am I writing something too lightweight for this film?

Thankfully, those who watched and understood the film never gave me that criticism. That was a relief.”

A decade later, the space for such films feels even more fragile. The idea of the indie film seems to be fading. What could have been a strong foray into stories with emotional and artistic depth never quite passed the baton. The torch dimmed somewhere in the distance, and nobody seemed to notice.

Varun told me this morning, on a long whatsapp voice note about this cultural shift over the last ten years:

“Luckily, we got a bunch of producers—so many of them—and even then, not a single one interfered with the creative process. No one told us to do this or change that. There was a budget constraint, and a serious one. During the shoot, after the shoot, even in post-production, we had very little money: almost none. But that’s a constraint most filmmakers know how to tackle. Budget isn’t the real constraint. Creative interference is. And we didn’t face that. So when I look back now, ten years later, I feel what we made was truly special.

Back then, maybe I didn’t think of it as special because indie cinema was having a moment. There were no limits to what you could imagine doing. If you recall, in 2012 Gangs of Wasseypur came out, and after that it felt like the indie scene had really taken off. You had Titli, Gangs of Wasseypur, and even in the mainstream there was Dum Laga Ke Haisha by Sharat Katariya under Yash Raj Films—where the leads weren’t your typical glamorous heroes and heroines. That film broke the usual beauty standards even within Yash Raj.

So many things at the time felt inspiring, like you could do anything. And Masaan emerged in the middle of all that. It didn’t necessarily break the scene, it was part of that wave. Around the same time, Miss Lovely also came out. Each year, one or two films would arrive that brought with them a completely unexpected new world. But after 2018, that entire scene started fading out. Only then did we begin to realize the true value of what we had.

Today, if I take the Masaan script to someone, I don’t think anyone would make it. Not a single person. Anyone who would, would have to sell their own house or jewelry to fund it. No studio, no production house would come forward now to make something like that, which was still possible in 2015. Because today, our minds and our entire system are gripped by the algorithm. In 2015, the algorithm didn’t exist in this way. It was there, yes, for big commercial films. But for small and mid-budget films, there was no algorithmic control. In fact, people wanted you to make anti-algorithm films.

But now, whether it’s indie cinema or anything else, every film has to pass through the algorithm. Theaters no longer have space for these kinds of films. OTT platforms are even tougher. The executives sitting there now seem to only care about what the algorithm says. At least with commercial cinema, you can say they still care about what moves people emotionally:what song makes you cry, what themes touch your heart. Their broad concepts are still somewhat grounded.

But these algorithmic platforms, their ideas are not rooted in anything human. The data comes from one machine, and is interpreted by another machine, and then these results are imposed on us. There’s no human learning in it, no real logic. Just a dumb system trying to guess what people will like. So it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to do something truly independent within the existing system:be it theaters, OTTs, or even YouTube. YouTube might be the last standing platform for original voices, but even that is shrinking rapidly.

Outside of that, I don’t think there’s much left. It’s a very pessimistic thing to say, but I feel like even in 2015, most people were already pessimistic:they just didn’t know how much more despair was coming. Maybe ten years from now, in 2035, I’ll look back and say, oh 2025 was actually a great time. Because by then, maybe creators won’t even exist anymore. Robots will be creating, watching, and pushing content. We’ll just be sitting on the sidelines doing our podcast, talking to each other-and that’s it.”

Interestingly, just days after this conversation, news broke that Raanjhanaa—the 2013 film where the hero dies in the end—is being re-released this year with an AI-generated ‘happy ending’ where hero doesn’t die. What once felt like a joke is now official news. This reminds me of that famous. It’s clear that algorithm is new god and a machine that has never been in love now decides who lives and who dies. And for now, it has decided that indie cinema must die and this perhaps isn’t a happy ending by any standard.

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