Blogical Conclusion

TWO TOMES

A fascinating account of the journey of the Indian documentary. Plus, a frustrating set of essays about the Indian feature film.

OCT 25, 2009 – AT FIRST GLANCE, BD GARGA’S From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India would appear the most tedious of reads, an instant cure for insomnia, if only because the fancy-pants phrase “non-fiction film” immediately mutates in our minds to “Films Division documentary.” The author does not offer dissent. He notes, in his introduction, that Films Division was little more than the official mouthpiece of the ministry of information and broadcasting. “With its tight grip on production and exhibition, over the years it grew into the largest documentary film unit in the world, producing films with the regularity of a ‘sausage factory’… Tired of its inertia and ‘play safe’ attitude, whenever a filmmaker has taken a deep breath and flexed his muscles, the results have been surprisingly rewarding. Sadly, such instances have been few and far between.”

Over time, the documentary, that humble country cousin of the feature film, has evoked worldwide shock and awe (the former in the case of Michael Moore’s needle-in-the-eye provocations like Fahrenheit 9/11, the latter with classics like Nanook of the North, Un Chien Andalou, and Triumph of the Will). But back home, we’d rather endure repeat screenings of What’s Your Raashee? than submit ourselves to Films Division screeds about tribal customs of the North East. One reason is surely craft. Whether you’re portraying a thriller or painting a picture of itinerant silk-workers, you need that invisible glue to bind the audience to your art – and a literal-minded collage of images backed by a voiceover drone just doesn’t cut it. But could there be other reasons? Perhaps our systems, conditioned to the hyper-narrative of mainstream moviemaking, cannot begin to cope with the oneiric rhythms of the non-fiction film.

That’s something Garga doesn’t get into. Instead, he chronicles landmark events in the development of non-fiction films in India – the propaganda films during the First and Second World Wars, the passing of the Cinematograph Act in 1918 and the establishment of the censor board, Louis de Rochemont’s controversial coverage of the police repression of 1930, the series of ‘The March of Time’ films on India, the founding of the Film Advisory Board and the pioneering efforts of the Information Films of India, and the coverage of communal riots during the Partition. And post-Independence, the author discusses the role of Films Division, the body of works by socially and politically motivated “women directors” like Suhasini Mulay, Deepa Dhanraj and Sumitra Bhave, and the exertions of filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan who have kept the faith “in the face of myriad distribution, logistical and financial hurdles.”

How did a project of this magnitude – and marginal interest to the layperson, to be honest – attract Garga? In 1980, JBH Wadia gifted him “three thick files neatly marked ‘Film Advisory Board 1940-41-42’,” the entire record of Wadia’s tenure as chairman of the Film Advisory Board set up by the British India government. Garga supplemented this material with research in archival organisations (in India and England) and correspondence with scholars like Dr Philip Woods, whose “special study has been British propaganda in India during the two World Wars.” A few of the fascinating nuggets go back even further, like the mention of FD Stewart, a photographer attached to the British garrison town of Poona during the 1890s, who made “scenic films” like The Indian Dhobie and Fire Brigade Turnout in Bombay, along with films showing prisoners of the Boer War being brought to Fort Ahmadnagar.

The early years comprise works like India – The Empire’s Greatest Problem Today (1930) and Political Wheels Begin Moving (1931; about Gandhi’s tea with King George V and Queen Mary at 10 Downing Street). Garga drags to light an unknown (at least to me) aspect of V Shantaram, who took over as the Film Advisory Board’s production chief and oversaw works like Daughters of India (1943; about heroines like Chand Bibi and Padmini of Chittore) and Voice of the People (1943; the first film about the press in India, tracing its history from Mughal chronicles). But after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the War, the Defence of India Rule was revoked and theatre owners were no longer compelled to screen government-approved films. Garga notes, “It was a sad end to a worthy effort. [These films] had made the audience aware of their own country.”

The closure of Information Films of India (IFI) and Indian News Parade (INP) “deprived the people of the visual record of one of the most momentous events in Indian history – the liquidation of the British Empire. The available footage from diverse sources is much too sketchy and uneven to give an idea of the intense and painful process of transfer.” We then move on to Independence, to Nehru’s speech about our long-pending tryst with destiny, and Garga bemoans the fact that “no one had the far-sight to capture this once-in-a-lifetime event… The words and the visuals were recorded separately and do not synchronize.” Subsequently, however, IFI and INP were revived and brought under one umbrella, initially named Film Unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and renamed, in April 1948, as Films Division.

Of the intensely utilitarian approach of the latter, eschewing art in favour of advocacy, Garga reveals that it was due to the films “having to cater to both urban and rural audiences… Great care was taken to make a balanced compromise that would serve both the educated and the uneducated audience.” (How self-evident this agenda appears today. When even our films struggle to strike a balance between urban and rural viewers, what options did documentaries have?) The result? Indian Art through the Ages (1949), The Adivasis of Madhya Pradesh (1949), and Our Original Inhabitants (1953), where, for a dance sequence, “the women arrived bare-breasted, as was their custom. Fearful of the reforming zeal of the bureaucrats… they were made to cover their breasts with a portion of a cloth draped around their waist. The staged dance had none of the abandon and exuberance of a tribal celebration.”

But Garga isn’t without sympathy. He writes, “One can understand and sympathize with Films Division’s zeal in embarking on an ambitious programme to discover Nehru’s ‘strong but invisible threads’ that united this country,” especially as we went about adjusting from a well-entrenched colonial rule to the freedoms of democracy. But even amidst self-explanatory textbook-equivalents like Assam (1958) and Kerala – The Land of Lagoons (1961), Garga celebrates Mohan Wadhwani’s Khajuraho (1956) as the point of maturity of the Indian documentary. “The camera moves at an unhurried pace, like a devotee towards the temples… In the concluding passage, the sculpture comes alive… Like Sergei Eisenstein’s stone lions in October (1928), the dancers and the singers suddenly appear invested with life… The film succeeds in creating a mood and milieu and a measure of understanding of the remarkable artists who, free of inhibitions, created these magnificent monuments to life and love.”

Garga wades through Roberto Rossellini’s arrival in India (in 1956) to make a documentary for French TV, Louis Malle’s controversial Phantom India (1969; the furore was about the frankness of his portrayal of the country, which displeased the government to the extent that the BBC was banned from filming in India for several years), the establishment of the IDPA (Indian Documentary Producers’ Association, which, in 1958, held the first-ever documentary film festival in India), and the aegis of agencies like the USIS and corporates like the Tatas and Hindustan Lever. He then reaches the 1970s, which were both the best and the worst of years, as the emergence of talents like Shyam Benegal, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani was eclipsed by the Emergency. Nevertheless, the flat, educational approach of earlier practitioners gave way to genres like the personality-based documentary and the angry documentary.

“By the end of the 1970s, Films Division was no longer the favoured agency of propaganda for the government,” whose focus had shifted to Doordarshan. And yet, a new kind of documentary had taken root – “honest, irreverent, questioning.” Even earlier, Gautam Ghose’s Hungry Autumn (1974) had analysed the Indian agronomic situation, but now, highly charged headlines – the Bhagalpur blindings, the Bhopal tragedy – were becoming the focus of films like An Indian Story (1981) and Bhopal: Beyond Genocide (1985). This development, no doubt, led to the ascent of controversial, contentious filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan, “the most influential… over the last twenty years.” I closed the book grateful for Garga’s chronicle of this long journey, but I was also surprised that he’d made it so scenic. Combining dry facts and daunting research with elegant, effervescent writing, he interests us in something as traditionally reviled as the documentary.

Narratives of Indian Cinema, on the other hand, intimidates us about something as traditionally celebrated as the feature film. Perhaps I’m being too harsh about this book of essays (edited by Manju Jain), addressing “the complex role that cinema has performed and continues to perform in the public sphere in India.” There’s a lot of painstaking analysis here – and personalised perspectives on cinema are always of interest to me – but oh, the language. Is there anything that stops you in your tracks like the argot of academia? A discourse on Mani Ratnam’s Kannathil Muthamittal deals with “the melodramatic hyperbolic matrix” and labels the film “a crypto-bourgeois text that claims the dynamics of trauma and reconciliation for India’s middle-class Tamils.” You’re left with a tough choice – persevere despite not having the foggiest about hyperbolic matrices and crypto-bourgeois texts, or instead, stop reading about these films and watch them all over again.

Copyright ©2009 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.