'1955: Key Events

• Nehru’s celebrated speech at the Avadi Congress calls for a ‘Socialistic Pattern of Society’. Khrushchev and Bulganin come to India. Nehru attends the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference, which inaugurates the Non- Aligned Movement in a cold war context. The leaders of the movement, Nehru, Nasser and Tito, meet again at Briony in 1956.

• Cow slaughter is banned in Andhra Pradesh.

• The National Defence Academy is set up at Khadakvasla.

• The Hindu Marriage Act is amended, making the minimum marriageable age for women 15 and for men 18; it also provides for divorces and individual separations.

• Dharamvir Bharati writes his Hindi verse play, Andha Yug; staged by Satyadev Dubey for Theatre Unit in 1960, it is one of the inaugural productions of a modern, post- Independence Indian theatre.

• Pather Panchali has its world première at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, coinciding with the official opening of the Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India Exhibition; in India, the film makes money for the West Bengal State Government, a significant factor in persuading the central government to set up the Film Finance Corporation in 1960, long after it had rejected the 1951 Enquiry Committee’s recommendation as financially impracticable.

• Festivals of Indian cinema in Beijing and London.

• The Children’s Film Society is set up.

• The South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce starts the Journal of the Film Chamber.

• The High Court at Andhra Pradesh grants an interim stay on the law of compulsory exhibition of ‘approved’ films and on the show tax.