Among other revenants, the ghost of Satyajit Ray haunts what one might call Indian independent cinema. At two recent festivals in New York, the Bengali auteur was very much in attendance: in Autograph,a Bengali film about a fictitious project to remake Ray's Nayak (1966); in Charulata ... a Sequel ... of the Life Untold!, a Malayalam film about a fictitious project to make a sequel to Ray's Charulata (1964); and in Gandu ("Asshole"),which gamely combats the malaise of post-Ray Bengali art productions—airless, dour, black-and-white shots of plump bourgeois staring into space—with music-video interludes of the gloomy, shaven-headed Gandu shouting hard-core punk, and with an extended finale of lush, full-color hard-core pornography.

"There now is something called 'independent cinema' in India," Galen Rosenthal, the program director of the South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF), told The Wall Street Journal. So how might the organizers of SAIFF and of the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council festival (MIACC), the two largest, oldest and last in a run of a half-dozen such festivals that took place this fall, demarcate this novel category? Going by their curation, it includes the country's popular regional cinemas; films made abroad by persons of Indian heritage; films made in India by foreigners; films designed specifically, even cynically, not for domestic consumption but for the international festival circuit; and any Hindi film made by smaller players. Is it, then, simply Not Bollywood?

Only this negative definition can account for, among other curious inclusions by both festivals, the most appealing film screened at either: a Tamil-language production based on the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana and boasting not only the marquee director Mani Ratnam and one of the largest budgets of any Indian film in history but also the superstar Aishwarya Rai, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Raavanan,in which an aggrieved bandit-king kidnaps the wife of the police officer trying to assassinate him,is the rare film that answers the halfhearted prophecies of mainstream Indian cinema's imminent breakthrough in North America: a story that is both indigenous and universal; imagery that is riotously, unnecessarily, nonsensically exuberant; musical numbers that feel natural and coherent rather than a reverse-engineering of the soundtrack into the film; production values sufficient to overcome kitsch; coracles, gang rape, wire-fu. The "independence" of this particular juggernaut is the more dubious when one considers that Raavanan was simultaneously shot and separately released as Raavan,a Bollywood version that switched out the Tamil actor Vikram for the Hindi-film star Abhishek Bachchan. (It's possible the festivals' avoidance of Bollywood fare owes less to curatorial rigidity than to fear of a genre ghetto.) Mr. Bachchan, opposite real-life wife Ms. Rai, is ruinously miscast; Vikram, who offered sexy respite from the pampered sameness of Bollywood's leading men, was in Raavan demoted to playing bad cop to Mr. Bachchan's raving antihero, an insatiate, bloated, kohl-eyed monster who resembles what Dave Navarro might look like after eating the other members of Jane's Addiction.

I asked Irrfan Khan—the titular Paan Singh Tomar in another festival film about a charismatic outlaw fighting corrupt cops, and an actor whose greater favor in Western films than as a conventional Bollywood lead is probably due to his own interesting looks (which put me in mind of a compliment The Times' Bosley Crowther once paid Jean-Paul Belmondo: "hypnotically ugly")—about the problems India's independent filmmakers seem to have in staking out their territory. Mr. Khan believes that subject matter is in part to blame. Although he dismissed the charges of poverty-peddling that dogged and outlived Ray, of today's filmmakers he said, "The festival films, they are about poverty. We are still looking for a voice that is universal, which doesn't have to deal with the poverty, with how pathetic conditions in India are."

Poverty surely is part of what filmmakers continue to find salable in India, but that motif is now part of something larger, an India of lawlessness, that comprises Schadenfreude-ready poverty as well gangsterism and anarchic capitalism.Indeed, gangster-capitalism (as distinct from the old-fashioned romantic outlawry of Paan Singh Tomar, Raavanan,etc.) has become its own stable category. In SAIFF's opening-night feature, That Girl in Yellow Boots,a Briton overstaying her visa in Bombay while searching for her truant father and baby-sitting her junkie boyfriend and working illegally in a massage parlor spends much of the film paying off a queue of extortionate figures—police and postal workers get cash; drug dealers get hand jobs. In MIACC's similarly surly opening-night feature, Shor ("Noise"), three Bombay story lines overlap in confluences of bribery, extortion and sundry criminality. With Love to Obama (for all purposes, a low-budget Bollywood comedy), about a crew of bottom-feeding small-fry kidnappers (one of whom is schoolboy-smitten with America and its president), is yet another vision of the state as parasitic or predatory, an entitled and undeserving gangster in chief, in contrast with the integrity of criminal entrepreneurs. "The Indian underworld is more honest than America's corporate world," marvels Om, the insolvent Indian-American businessman abducted by the hapless goons. Om exploits the criminals' self-regulating rectitude by devising an investment scam—Ponzi meets pig-in-a-poke—with himself as the overvalued asset, defrauding a succession of ever-more eminent kidnappers in order to pay off the previous ones, all of whom are suffering amid the global recession. (He takes a cut each time, and so gets to save his house in Queens from foreclosure.) 

Such a constellation of theme and subject matter in these and other recent films, along with hard-boiled mega-city cool and the requisite ebullient syncretism, points not to a hive-mind convergence of sensibilities but to the influence of a tested formula. This, making its presence felt, was a second ghost: Slumdog Millionaire.

Mr. Khan, who is best known stateside as the police investigator in Danny Boyle's 2008 film, agrees. "Slumdog," he asserted, "has changed things. Slumdog has woken up the American market, and now ... there's a possibility of making money." But because Slumdog (which had its U.S. premiere at MIAAC)was an international Hollywood-financed production rather than an Indian film, and because the Indian media's initial wariness toward it so quickly shifted to unreflective, supine enthusiasm, its aesthetic reverberations have been as shallow as they are broad. If it has inspired, it has also constrained. With their best market not at home but in the Anglophone West, with so little hope of recovering even modest budgets domestically, with their models for sleek internationalism so few (one thinks also of the crossover films of Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair), no wonder India's smaller narrative filmmakers are haunted by Mr. Boyle. He got the drop on them. Shor, to its credit, does sultry, rampant, venal, badass Bombay far better than Slumdog. But with Mr. Boyle having bought the rights to Maximum City—Suketu Mehta's definitive journalistic portrait of Bombay—which was itself influential to Slumdog's atmospherics; with Ms. Mehta set to direct the film adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; and with Ms. Nair set to direct and Johnny Depp signed to star in Shantaram, the fictionalized memoirs of an Australian-convict-turned-escapee-turned-Bombay-mafioso-turned-novelist, there is still much catching up to be done.

Perhaps this anxiety of influence is reflected in the substantial number of SAIFF and MIACC features about filmmaking itself. Just as Bollywood has long made movies about the making of Bollywood movies, these films are about inexperienced filmmakers' thwartedattempts at filmmaking. The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project follows the trials of a young Web site administrator who wants to make a short art film. Despite Kartik's callowness (his influences are Tarantino and more Tarantino), he finds himself taken under the wing of the indie filmmaker Srinivas Sunderrajan (played by the director of the film, the indie filmmaker Srinivas Sunderrajan). Artistic differences dog the production. "You talk Pulp Fiction,but you write American Pie," scolds Srinivas. "Don't do a Slumdog on me." And Kartik is stalked by a wraithlike, sunglassed bureaucrat-enforcer who claims that the would-be filmmaker doesn't have permission to make a film. Kartik tries ignoring his pursuer, running away, bribing him. "You still haven't understood me," says the Fury, finally bringing Kartik to heel. "I am the system. I'm always around you. You want to tell a story to an audience, don't you? So go ahead, don't be scared. I'll help you. By following the law. And I'm the law." "Right now," warns Srinivas, "you've been treading on that very thin line between your very cool independent cinema and very [salable] commercial cinema." (The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project has been touted as India's first mumblecore film.)