Instantly, I stopped feeling sorry for myself, because this is just the kind of sweeping statement I have to confront each time there’s a gathering of ‘cinema literate’ people. Okay, give me the names of ten good Bollywood movies you’ve seen in the last ten years, he says, completely convinced about the trashiness of all things Bollywood. Knowing the futility of what I’m about to embark on, I bring up a recent release. Have you seen, I ask him, Manorama, Six Feet Under?

Of course, he hasn’t. But that doesn’t stop him from carrying on. “Isn’t Manorama... a copy of (old Hollywood classic) Chinatown? When will we start making the kind of cinema that Europe, or Iran does?” With that, he heads off, leaving me, and the others at our table, feeling like we are in a time warp: for too long, this sort of derisive remark has informed debate around all mainstream cinema, and particularly movies made in Mumbai.

We all know that it isn’t as if Bollywood makes these wonderful films all the time. Too much of what comes out of mainstream assembly lines is trashy. But, and this is the thing, it is our trash. Those who dismiss our movies in so cavalier a fashion never mention trashy European cinema, and there’s a lot of that. Or those complete no-brainers that Hollywood churns out with as much enthusiasm as our own rip-off factories.

More importantly, they also see nothing which comes out of Bollywood. When it’s a point of pride that you do not watch any Hindi movies, how do you know what’s good, what’s not, and what’s more, what’s hot?

For all those who love dissing Bollywood, as well as for those who love Bollywood, here’s the good news: this is the year of new, edgy voices in Hindi cinema. The tightly-closed circuits of formulae and fortunes are being invaded by young filmmakers determined to break the mould. And their films, regardless of box office performance, are demanding that they be held up as standard-bearers for the new age Hindi indie cinema, whose parameters are very different from the parallelism that the 1970s was rife with: these filmmakers in 2007 are happy to tell their stories, with realism as their touchstone, within the mainstream framework, with, if they can get them, mainstream stars.

This has been the year of Parzania, Rahul Dholakia’s searing tale of the victims of Godhra, Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap’s marvellous re-creation of the 1993 Mumbai blasts, Bheja Fry, Sagar Bellary’s quirky take on the wisdom of idiots, Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd, Reema Kagti’s delightful rom com, featuring marriage and true love. And a few others, equally striking.

When was the last time a Hindi movie hero missed the last local home, and fell into a night of darkly comic adventures? First-timer Sanjay Khanduri gets one of Bollywood’s rise-and-shining actors Abhay Deol to play the everyman hero with just the right mix of bragadaccio and vulnerability, who is blissfully unaware that his cheerful companion is a whore, and tries to handle goons with the only weapon he has: running as fast as he can, in the opposite direction.

Navdeep Singh’s Manorama, Six Feet Under is a first-of-its-kind Indian noir. Its leading man, Abhay Deol again, is a suspended PWD inspector in a small dusty down on the Rajasthan/ Haryana border, who is dragging his feet through his ‘saadharan si zindagi’, till he runs into a mysterious woman. Murder is afoot, as are dirty secrets, buried six feet under, and more.

Yes, it is inspired by Chinatown, and the director acknowledges the debt in a superbly crafted scene. But those who are so quick to see that part of where it’s coming from, fail to notice that it is the first Hindi mainstream film which takes its amazingly authentic, rancid, small-town-intrigue flavour from yesteryear suspense rags like Manohar Kahaniyan, and the madly popular detective sagas featuring the Fearless Captain Ranjeet: only if you’ve picked up these pulp fiction novellas from an A.H. Wheeler cart, and devoured them in rattling train bogeys, will you recognise the connect. Manorama is an outstanding debut.

Another 2007 stand-out is Johnny Gaddar, whose hero is a baby-faced killer. He sets about eliminating his gang-members one by one, to get his hot little hands on a multi-crore booty, as a bevy of hot beauties shake their booty to the rousing retro beats of ‘move your body, baby’. Sriram Raghavan, directing his second, finds his groove, which races off from the starting block, and keeps up the pace, with unabashed nods to all its ‘inspirations’: the grungy novels of James Hadley Chase, the music of the 1970s, and a Bachchan movie in which AB plots a perfect murder.

A handful out of the more than hundred movies Bollywood churns out may not look like much. But when an Anil Ambani’s Adlabs is willing to back a Johnny, or former video house Shemaroo bankrolls a Manorama, it is clear that impoverished state-funded agencies are not the only recourse of these new brand of filmmakers: increasingly, big production houses are putting their money where their mouth has been.

All the films have fiercely indie souls. Their heroes are not the singing-dancing-all-in-one heroes that are long past their sell-by date; their heroines do not change sixty-four costumes in a single song shot among Swiss alps. They use humour, dark or otherwise, not as a tired second track, but as a hugely effective weapon. The films have a strong sense of time and place; Bollywood’s favourite location, La La Land, is a thing of the past.

Above all, they are telling us stories that they want to tell. And we want to see.

The writer is the ‘Indian Express’ film critic