Chapter 2

Late colonial India

No takers for empire

Sound came into India in spectacular fashion: in 1931, the Imperial Studio’s proprietor Ardeshir Irani rushed out Alam Ara to narrowly beat Madan Theatres’ much bigger-budgeted song and dance Shirin Farhad to the post of being the Indian cinema’s first full-length sound film. Both films had been derived from the popular Parsee theatre. Alam Ara’s author, playwright Joseph David, became especially famous for his Wadia Movietone scripts including the legendary Hunterwali/Lady With the Whip (1935), a stunt movie made with the Australian actress Fearless Nadia, ‘protector of the poor and punisher of evildoers’, and performer of stunts such as fighting twenty soldiers at once.

All of these films, Alam Ara, Shirin Farhad, and Hunterwali, became for late colonial India examples of an almost perverse globalization. The cinema appeared to be capable of doing almost everything—borrowing, for instance, from diverse sources around the globe—except, it seemed, what it was meant to be doing under colonial rule.

Between 1920 and 1931 India saw its first boom in indigenous film production. The number of feature films jumped from three in 1918 to thirty-five in 1921, sixty-three in 1922, and 209 in 1931. The Indian cinema was clearly set to take-off. What was entirely unclear was where it was taking off to. Both the boom in production, as well as the kind of money flowing into studios and into movie theatres, sent deeply conflicting messages. India’s movie economy found itself, not for the first time, speaking for a larger economic sector of which it would be at once a symbol and an anomaly.

The problem the cinema presented was primarily this. Between 1913 and the early 1930s, India was the largest importer of British goods. British manufactures represented more than a third of India’s total imports, and the Indian market was considered something of a life-support for Britain’s very survival as an industrial power.

When the cinema came along, therefore, the assumption was that India’s vast audiences too would benefit Britain, and a nascent Indian film industry was envisaged that might join hands with Britain to co-produce and co-market films. It quickly became evident that this would be unachievable, as unexpected barriers arose to the British cinema’s ability to access Indian markets in anything like a stable, long-term way.

India’s baffling intransigence towards British cinema would now make its movie industry strangely symptomatic of colonial industry as a whole. Industry was the bedrock of the imperium, and for it to be sustainable, it needed to set up infrastructure, needed untrammelled access to domestic markets, and, above all, needed access to Indian investment capital. It was as though the cinema, in its denial of all three for British co-productions, found itself becoming a prime example of India’s apparent unwillingness to become a ‘proper’ market for British manufactures.

The arrival of the film industry thus provided further confirmation of India’s incapability of belonging properly to the colonial system. A role was being envisaged for the cinema as a whole within the British Empire that was in several respects similar to that which Hollywood was playing in setting up a rival American empire. This role the Indian cinema appeared unable and, worse, unwilling to play.

As early as 1924, the Bombay Chronicle (5 December 1924) bemoaned a crisis that the Indian cinema faced, with language that would be used for decades to come. Although ‘India possesses natural scenery, the most varied and magnificent in the world’, was ‘strewn with historic monuments, the like of which is not to be seen in any other country’, and although its people had ‘customs and modes of life are among the most picturesque on earth’, all these natural advantages appeared ‘not sufficient to enable those engaged in the film industry to turn out products of first-rate quality and aesthetic perfection’. India possessed a market potential that was unique in the British Empire, but its audiences were simply not cultured enough to either appreciate films from elsewhere, or even to distinguish between friendly films made within the Empire and ‘foreign’ films that were hostile to the imperial project (read Hollywood).

The problem was, many felt, only partly with the films being made. Mostly it was a problem with the underdeveloped tastes of the Indian audience. One aspect of it was how to tutor this audience in how to acquire good taste. Another was to decide how Britain could make an appropriate colonial cinema that would work in India. The Times (London, 23 August 1923) wrote that ‘there are no home-made productions there and very few British productions are imported. The Americans have a monopoly in the market and they send films over in an indiscriminate way … To the English they are merely ridiculous. To the native, who probably believes that they give a fair idea of English life, they may be very harmful indeed.’

Colonial ambitions for the cinema

The Indian cinema’s inability to fall in line with a colonial agenda spoke deeply to an emerging crisis within Britain, and the Empire as a whole. ‘At the turn of the century, British film-makers were among the most enterprising in the world,’ goes the opening line of Andrew Higson’s book on British national cinema: ‘By the First World War, this initiative had been lost to the American film industry.’ What the loss of Britain’s film industry did was to force a new urgency on the need to protect Empire markets. The Prince of Wales referred to it as ‘films (that) are a real aid to the development of Imperial trade’, recalling the catchphrase ‘Trade Follows the Film’.

In 1925, soon after the fragmentation of the Empire became real with the breaking away of Catholic Ireland as the Irish Free State in 1922, the Imperial Economic Conference was convened in London. It was, said the Conference, a matter of ‘the most serious concern’ that the films ‘shown in the various parts of the Empire should be to such an overwhelming extent the product of foreign countries’ (once again read Hollywood). Arrangements for the ‘distribution of such Empire films as are produced [were] far from adequate’. From now on, ‘great importance’ would be attached ‘to the larger production within the Empire of films of high entertainment value and films of sound educational merit’. New measures would be introduced that would extend ‘ample preference for free entry for films produced within the Empire’.

This initiative put both Indian movie producers and representatives of Indian industry in a quandary. It was clearly to the benefit of the Indian cinema to qualify as a key part of Empire Film, as it was for its industry to qualify for imperial quotas so that Indian films might also be shown elsewhere in the British Empire. But this meant, first and foremost, that India had to learn how to make properly colonial cinema. India ‘owes a duty first to herself’, said the landmark 1932 British report Film in National Life. The ‘production and distribution of films which worthily express the national character is an obligation of Imperial as well as of international partnership’. If India was going to live up to its responsibilities, it needed to understand that a film should at once ‘display the ancient dignity of the Mahabharata as teach the Indian peasant the elements of hygiene and sanitation’.

India’s nationalist leadership was clearly suspicious of the entire endeavour, for India’s interests were no longer coincident with Britain’s. Punjab’s nationalist leader Lala Lajpatrai vehemently opposed the entire idea of Empire quota, considering it his duty ‘to enter an emphatic protest against the insidious way in which various methods are adopted to thrust the principle of British Imperial Preference by the back-door’. Speaking at the 1927 Legislative Assembly debates, he said that although he had no objection to the idea in principle, he saw it as a ploy to force Britain’s cinema down the throats of the Empire. This expression of a ‘parental solicitude to protect the morals of the people of this country’ was actually nothing but an ‘anxiety of Government to protect and encourage British produced films’.

To the British, it wasn’t only a matter of protecting colonial subjects from the cinema. It was a matter also of protecting the Empire itself, as Sir Hesketh Bell, former governor of Uganda and Nigeria, famously said. While ‘we know that a vast deal of harm can be done even to civilised persons by the display of bad pictures’, he wrote, it had only recently become possible to study the ‘injury which can be done to primitive people by the exhibition of demoralising films’. Such a negative impact could ‘hardly be exaggerated’, according to Bell: ‘The success of our government of subject races depends almost entirely on the degree of respect which we can inspire.’ To him, ‘incalculable is the damage that has already been done to the prestige of Europeans in India and the Far East through the widespread exhibition of ultra-sensational and disreputable pictures’.

Through the late 19th century, the use of social hygiene had been a key context for validating state regulation of people’s behaviour, and by the early 20th century this became one of the central institutions of both the censorship mechanism and the new Empire Films policy. The consequent assembly of an apparatus of public medical health under Sanitary Commissioners and Inspectors and the organization of All India Sanitary Conferences in various cities in the period 1911‐14 and after the Montagu‐Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, put together one of the more influential and elaborate instruments of governmental discipline.

The instruments of health and sanitation were influential not least because of the way they directly acted upon the colonized native body, a transgression most vividly evidenced in plague eradication programmes and the passing of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897. The widespread authority that sanitary policing gave to its officers included supervision of conservancy, administering the registration of births and deaths, investigation into epidemics, and the right to supervise the sanitary requirements of buildings.

Liberal-nationalist perceptions of the often excessive, and invasive, control exerted upon the social behaviour of women had become a substantial enough issue for the Indian National Congress to pass a resolution in 1888 asking for abolition of British laws regulating prostitution. Now several new organizations of native social policing, from pro-censorship Leagues of Social Purity to Temperance Committees and Anti-Nautch campaigns, succeeded in putting together a broad consensus around the censorship apparatus as a social health issue, in which such organizations would be given a direct role to play.

And so, an organization named the Social Hygiene Delegation said to the 1928 Indian Cinematographic Committee that the cinema was the root cause of a large number of India’s evils. In ‘every province that we visited’, they said, they found that ‘the evil influence of cinema was cited by educationists and representative citizens as one of the major factors in lowering the standards of sex conduct and thereby tending to increase the dissemination of disease’. For them, the evil influence of the cinema hinged on the Indian inability to read ‘correct’ meanings into the ‘Western’ cinema: Indian audiences misread them, saw things in them and learnt damaging lessons from them ‘stimulat(ing) crime and sensuality’. ‘Films depicting stories of crime and immorality in European and American settings have an evil influence on the youth of those countries; the influence is far more pernicious when the ordinary habits of life, the traditions and social customs of the West are interpreted in the light of the traditions and social customs of the East.’

Financiers and frontmen

Indian cultural intransigence—its unwillingness and, to many, its inability, to make a cinema that might rise to the colonial challenge—would get mapped onto another, larger economic issue. India’s thriving informal banking sector, which supplied 90 per cent of all loans and investments across the subcontinent, appeared curiously inimical to industrial investment. It preferred instead to extend loans mainly to rural trade, becoming something of an engine for rural commoditization. The kind of money that was coming into the movies now became in itself part of the problem, and provided a further explanation for why the movies were bad: they were so because of the bad money that was financing them.

In 1927, Imperial’s Ardeshir Irani was extensively quizzed about the workings of the Indian film industry by the Indian Cinematograph Committee. Irani began with a mild boast. There was indeed major demand in India for the movies, he said, but asserted that India’s own indigenous producers were ‘able to meet the demand very easily’, that, in short, there was no need to import films, either from Britain or from anywhere else. Irani went to some length, thus, to dismiss the very opportunity British producers had hoped for from the vast Indian market. Pressed by his interrogators as to where he got his finances from, and having, in one questioner’s words, ‘skirted a good deal round the question of the financing of the Indian producing companies’, Irani admitted that he had two partners, yes, they had their own capital, and no, none of this was ‘public money’. There were, he admitted, some ‘fly-by-night companies’, which were ‘appearing, going on for a month or two and then disappearing’ usually with unpaid debts. To him, these were ‘not companies’, but just people who rented his premises to make their own movies, or commission specific productions from studios like his.

Irani’s problem was clearly in the end not money. There was no dearth of investors. His problem was respectability. Asked if government assistance might be beneficial for the movie industry, he passionately asserted that this was vital: vital not for the finance it could bring but because, if Government invested funds, it would encourage ‘many prominent Indians who have surplus money’ to ‘come forward and help us once they see that Government is advancing money to film producing companies’. There was a ‘sort of social stigma attached to the industry’, he said, that needed to be dispelled.

Irani’s need was clear, but his concerns about government participation were prescient. As far back as 1921, the Westminster Gazette said that ‘the Indian States provide among the most profitable markets for indecent films’, and that ‘as soon as film production in India becomes better organized, there is every reason to fear that this illicit trade in indecent films may increase considerably’. Irani may or may not have known about this concern, but when he was asked if in return for financial support from the government he would agree to ‘give some power to the government to see that you produce good films’, his answer was unequivocal: ‘No, no power. We don’t want any control of the government over that.’

Lahore cinema: the Anarkali effect

Through the 1920s, then, the ‘problem of cinema’ came to be fashioned in both bureaucratic and public consciousness as more or less this: Indian movies were made by bad money, were indecent, and more, unhygienic. For all that, they were hugely popular locally. And for reasons that often baffled colonial authority, Indian producers appeared unqualified to receive assistance on reform, and incapable of handling it when it was offered.

An important place where such a model of cinema developed was Lahore. Since 1900, when the Punjab Land Alienation Act was passed by the British to keep its agrarian economy within a feudal structure, major quantities of money moved from the Punjab countryside into Lahore and beyond in search of new investment opportunity. One consequence of this credit economy was the boom in the prices of urban land. Investments in land extended into further investments into movie theatres, at the time the most profitable use of the land, and finance into film production often came about to feed the theatres. Several of Lahore’s earliest producers were exhibitors, theatre owners, and real-estate investors putting money into production mainly to keep their theatres supplied.

The movies that were now made, with money from such sources—a kind of anti-industrial trading capital committed to a rural status-quo assembled during colonial rule and in complicity with the rulers—often reflected the cultures of their financiers. The cinema became integral to a variety of quasi-industrial alternatives: such alternatives being generally viewed as more suitable to the communitarian cultural and economic requirements of its investors. Along with businesses geared to agricultural products, and low-technology consumer goods oriented to the regional market, came the movies, viewed as locally produced, commercially viable, low-tech commodities.

We saw Gul-e-Bakavali as perhaps Bombay’s first major contribution to a cinematic idiom that would travel through the subcontinent. Lahore had its own, the equally pervasive legend of Anarkali, which would become the founding legend of a popular culture across the Indian cinema’s many languages.

Anarkali originates in its contemporary form in a romantic play written in 1922 by a young Lahore-based playwright Imtiaz Ali Taj. His play, simply titled Anarkali, tells of the tragic love affair between Prince Salim, son of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, and a slave girl. Although the play was a hit, it gave little indication at the time as to the scale of the impact it would have on future cinema.

Roughly five years after the play was staged, the Great Eastern Film Corporation, Delhi, announced a big-budget screen adaptation, The Loves of a Mughal Prince. To be directed by the actor and director Charu Roy and featuring the original playwright Imtiaz Ali Taj himself as the Mughal Emperor Akbar, the big-budget production was slow to complete. Even as it was being filmed, Irani’s Imperial Studio—never one to miss a business opportunity—rushed out a rival production with its main star Sulochana, simply titled Anarkali. The rivalry would create the biggest genre, in terms of production scale, that the Indian cinema would ever see: the Mughal epic (see Figure 2).

2. One of the many Mughal-era spinoffs of the Anarkali legend. Publicity leaflet of the silent Ulfat-e-Mohammed/Loves of Prince Mohammed, featuring cinema star Khalil, made at the Kohinoor studios, Bombay.

The story would be retold: most famously in India’s biggest-ever film production, K. Asif’s gargantuan epic Mughal-e-Azam/Emperor of the Mughals (1960). It would then be adapted in Telugu in 1955, in Malayalam in 1966, and then again in Telugu in 1978 with N. T. Rama Rao’s florid Akbar Saleem Anarkali.

Great Eastern was beaten to this particular goalpost, but it was not done. That studio had earlier part-supported the Indo-German production by Himansu Rai, scenarist and playwright Niranjan Pal’s adaptation of Edwin Arnold’s orientalist poem of 1861 titled The Light of Asia (1925). Several of its members would now support Rai’s second feature, the spectacular silent film Shiraz (1928), the film that, in the end, stamped the Mughal romance with its stature. Shiraz tells the story of how infant princess Selima, lost in a raid on a caravan, is found and raised by a potter, and grows up with his son, the sculptor Shiraz (played by Rai himself). She is later abducted and sold as a slave to Prince Khurram, later Emperor Shah Jehan, who also falls for her. When Selima is caught with Shiraz, the young man is condemned to be trampled to death by an elephant. A pendant worn by Selima reveals her royal status and she saves her adoptive brother, marries the prince, and becomes Empress Mumtaz Mahal. Years later, when the Empress is dead, the old and blind Shiraz is commissioned by Shah Jehan to build the Taj Mahal in her memory.

Lahore had clearly started something. A new and unprecedented subcontinental market had opened up for its productions. Several new financiers appeared in Great Eastern’s wake, willing to invest in ideas by young people like Imtiaz Ali Taj: men such as, for instance, Hakim Ramprashad, owner of the Capital cinema on Lahore’s MacLeod Road. Having made money in film exhibition, he now entered into small-time production where he surrounded himself with young men who, like Taj, had ideas. Especially significant was a ‘Bhatti Gate group’ of young film enthusiasts, many of whom would go on to extraordinary careers in Bombay.

The example of reform: Bombay Talkies

Sound came to India in 1931, and by 1934 its film industry had completely converted to it. Between 1928 and 1938 movie theatres increased fivefold, from 275 to 1,657. India transited into sound with few of the economic crises that affected movie exhibition in most parts of the world. Its difficulties lay elsewhere.

The arrival of sound only hardened the colonial divide. In 1930, with sound on the horizon, the Report of the Colonial Films Committee was published, which strenuously argued that the cinema could only exist if it were used as an instrument of education. Second, collaborations with British industry needed to be put in place, which meant first and foremost overcoming India’s internal resistance to such collaborations. And finally, a system of censorship along with an adequate licensing mechanism had to be instituted and made acceptable to the industry. Clearly the Indian movie industry appeared neither capable of nor willing to take on such responsibilities.

On its side, India was poised for major growth: sound saw the establishment of studios in Bombay, Calcutta, Kolhapur, Lahore, and Madras. These studios seemed to have no problems attracting investors, since they had a stable local market and something like a defined indigenous style. What they needed, especially in this era of stabilization, was social respect, and this essentially meant falling in line with the colonial agenda, and defining some purpose for the cinema.

As far as industrial reform was concerned, the example at hand was as spectacular as it was short-lived. In 1934 the Bombay Talkies was set up by Himansu Rai. Having earlier sought to creatively merge the Lahore idiom (and Lahore’s finances) with investments from Germany and London, in films like The Light of Asia (1925), Shiraz (1928), and A Throw of Dice (1929), and his first sound production, Karma (1933), Rai now sought new ambitions with a corporate Board consisting of men who were among the city’s leading bankers and industrialists. The studio, thus backed by major financial institutions, paid a regular dividend to all stockholders from its third year onwards.

By the late 1930s, Bombay Talkies had everything going for it in terms of colonial respectability. They had the stars, some of India’s biggest, led by Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani. It remains curious that the studio came up with perhaps the most influential signature style of all of India’s studios with an all-European filmmaking team, including director Franz Osten, cameraman Josef Wirsching, set designer Carl von Spreti (later Count Carl von Spreti, the West German ambassador murdered in Guatemala in 1970), and soundman Len Hartley. Their films were mostly gentle reformist melodramas set largely in an undefined rural Indian village and among the feudal elites of both town and country. The best known was the classic Achhut Kanya/The Untouchable (1936), a story of caste inequalities and oppressive rural practices, featuring Devika Rani as an untouchable girl, and her tragic love story with a village boy, played by Ashok Kumar. They come up against sectarian villagers, until in the end the on-rushing train of fate ends the strife.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that such an imagination for how to make movies, tailored exclusively for colonial-corporate approval, would not last. Himansu Rai’s death in 1940 split the studio into two camps, the more successful of which broke away to set up the Filmistan Studio in 1942, returning to the more familiar model of a producer-owner fronting an enterprise backed by shadowy financiers.

The ‘signature style’

Brief as its existence was, few studios could match Bombay Talkies’ ambition. Most others had to find ways to chart their own path in demonstrating their capability either to put in place proper industrial practices or to acquire other credentials for reform. All this even as they maintained their accountability to their distributors and financiers, who in turn used their stranglehold over studios to demand dedicated screen time for major productions for their own theatres. Although the studios were set up as proper companies, either as proprietorships or as joint-stock ventures, their income was typically controlled by loans and advances from distributors.

And so, when these studios produced, in the 1930s, the first generation of India’s cinematic auteurs, the filmmakers that emerged had their work cut out for them. These auteurs had to become living embodiments of industrial reform. This was a problem for many, who had begun humbly, owing their origins to the same discredited genres that British colonial authority had sought to sanitize. As several of the great masters of the interwar period arrived at individual signature styles of direction, they also saw their ‘signatures’ being buffeted by the contradictory expectations of the colonial government, the nationalist movement, and the industry itself.

In the first place, the ‘signature style’ was the joint property of studio and maker: something of a problem that would surface a scant decade later as many auteurs walked out of studios to set up shop on their own. In the second place, this signature idiom had to contend with the increasingly popular genre of the musical ensemble, even then the Indian cinema’s most durable form.

Most of the great stylists began modestly. Some began with blown-up versions of silent era genres with bigger budgets, enhanced production values, and new ideological adherences. To others, the need was for ideological coherence. Future producer-director and movie mogul Mehboob Khan, an unaffiliated Communist, chose the hammer and sickle emblem for his future production house, even as he expanded the spectacular idiom he had learnt from Imperial into ‘reform socials’—films premised on the imagining of a pre-capitalist ruralism (with its blood feuds, debts of honour, and kinship laws). Later, in films like the classic Mother India (1955), Mehboob would further extend such ruralism in conflict with a modernized state. Marathi filmmaker Bhalji Pendharkar, whose affiliations were with the religious right-wing group, the Hindu Mahasabha, adhered with great persistence to the Maratha historical genre with films based on Chhatrapati Shivaji through almost his entire career, becoming something of a poet-laureate of the future state of Maharashtra.

Most extraordinary in its diverse and shifting ambition was the example of V. Shantaram. Shantaram will appear half a dozen times in different guises in our narrative. He makes his first entry in my story in 1929 when, together with four other partners, he broke away from the Maharashtra Film Company to start the Prabhat Studio. There he became the studio’s sole ‘high-art’ A-list director, signing big-budget reform socials with a distinctive signature flourish. Like several other studios at the time, Prabhat made two kinds of films. One, a high-budget production with a look and feel that might at once compare favourably with Hollywood at the same time as it aspired for modernist credentials in the European sense. And a second, a lesser category of ‘saint films’ and mythologicals for a low-end domestic audience: bread-and-butter productions that had their own dedicated local following.

In 1934, Shantaram made the studio’s first blockbuster, Amritmanthan/Churning of the Nectar (1934). It would also reveal the problems of making the transition from low to high art. Beginning with a sensational low-angle circular track movement as cult followers of the dreaded demoness Chandika meet in a dungeon of flickering lights and deep shadow, Amritmanthan inaugurates a new ambition, both cinematically and politically. When the rationalist king bans human and animal sacrifices dedicated to the fanatical goddess, the high priest orders the king’s assassination.

Both its rationalist message and aesthetic ambition reveal their origins in the mythological, especially as it illustrates its ethical dilemma in the twice-told legend of the churning of the seas, once by the priest to show how evil must be exorcised, and again by a good general to show how demons often appear disguised as gods. Even as the film’s strongly political thrust has the people rise in revolt, it lowers its modernist ambition by buttressing its politics with divine intervention.

In 1937, Shantaram made an even more aggressive claim for modernist reform, with the bilingual Duniya Na Mane/The World Will Not Accept. The novel by Narayan Hari Apte was a landmark in the social reform movement of the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, denouncing venal marriages that ignored women’s rights. Although the novel was a straightforwardly realist work, the film version stressed its melodramatic overtones to a degree unprecedented in the Indian cinema of the time. The film repeatedly attempted bravura visual stylizations, as in the editing of the brief marriage sequence, or the shattered mirror scene returning multiple laughing faces to the distraught old man gazing into the mirror. Even more aggressively, Shantaram now populated its cast with members of the experimental theatre, revealing the influence of European naturalism, of Ibsen, and more directly of George Bernard Shaw.

As Shantaram transformed Prabhat’s mythological with explicitly modernist ambitions, Bengal’s P. C. Barua would transform a cinematic genre that India’s most renowned sound studio, Calcutta’s New Theatres, selected as its strategy for respectable cinema: the boi, literally meaning the book, now referring to the genre of the literary movie. Barua had impeccable modernist credentials: born into the aristocratic family of the Maharajah of Gauripur, in the Eastern Indian state of Assam, he had graduated from Calcutta’s elite Presidency College, then visited Europe and, apparently inspired by the work of René Clair and Ernst Lubitsch, had spent a few months at Elstree.

At the New Theatres, Barua worked with the studio’s staple author, the popular novelist and short-story writer Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, gradually extending his stories into one dedicated to a portrayal of Bengal’s decaying aristocracy. Even as stars spoke in monosyllables, trapped in debilitating stillness as they portrayed a stultified, nihilistic aristocratic class, his cinematographer (and future director) Bimal Roy mounted sweeping pan and crane shots, and perhaps the most mobile movie camera of his time in India.

Big as Shantaram’s career was, and important as his work at the Prabhat studio undoubtedly was in the interwar years, it is ironic that the movie that went on to become both the biggest commercial hit of the studio—and in hindsight its most significant film—was a considerably lower-budgeted ‘saint movie’ telling the life of the 17th-century Marathi poet-saint Sant Tukaram/Tukaram the Saint, played by an actor who never did anything else of consequence in the cinema: Vishnupant Pagnis. Situated around the lower-caste Tukaram’s confrontations with the Brahmin elite, it bound song, gesture, rhythm, and camera together with character and crowd behaviour denoting the spiritual connection between the poet and the people while separating off the members of the brahminical caste. It adhered to most of the conventions of the genre, including numerous ‘miracle’ scenes in which the poet’s god intervenes to demonstrate the truth of Tukaram’s teachings.

The film appeared to be able to bring to these conventions an unusual degree of conviction, as was demonstrated when a composition written originally for the film was believed by many to have been an unknown composition of the original poet-saint himself. For all its focus on special effects and popular belief, the film broke new ground with the earthy portrayal of Tukaram’s wife, who energetically squeezes cow-dung cakes for fuel and refuses to ascend to heaven, preferring to stay on Earth and look after the children.

Many years later, Geeta Kapur, art historian and major theorist of Indian modernism, would draw attention to the capacity of Sant Tukaram and other films of such humble genres to become ‘expressly adaptable to historical ends’ in ways sometimes seemingly beyond the reach of high-modernist practice. Kapur’s contention that a low-budget bread-and-butter Prabhat studio genre movie could be a much more important film for a growing Indian modernism than, say, the more explicitly modernist claims of the studio auteurs, speaks deeply to the contradictory colonial aspirations of this time, and the possible role the lowbrow popular might have in late colonial India.

The Second World War, and arrival of realism

In 1935 the Government of India Act was passed, giving India provincial autonomy. Independence, it increasingly appeared, was sooner or later inevitable. But there would be one last episode in the ongoing saga between colonial authority and intransigent movie producers. For all the efforts of the interwar studios to attempt social respectability with authorial claims and efforts at industrial reform, the story was not over. And colonial reform would see one final effort with the arrival of the Second World War: with some startling results.

In 1940, Britain announced its official Film Propaganda Policy. That policy, written by British art historian Kenneth Clark, adopted the principles laid out by Lord Macmillan to the War Cabinet to declare the birth of a new entity: a state-approved cinema, which would focus on Empire values. This was as important for a major commercial studio such as Ealing as it was for the Crown Film shorts. It was agreed that propaganda should not be presented blatantly: that a propaganda film should first be ‘good entertainment if it is to be good propaganda’.

By 1942, when British expectations of India’s movie producers began to take a definite shape, the ‘entertainment value + wartime’ definition had become increasingly established. This would not deal with the war in any trivial way. War, John Grierson once famously wrote, had to be seen as ‘only a violent extension of the disturbances intrinsic in, shall we say, sectional initiative and the rule of laissez-faire’. The ‘obligations on the government to initiate and secure co-operation [are] only an extension of obligations already forced upon it in peace time’.

The Indian problem was by now a familiar refrain: how to get the Indian cinema to cooperate with the war effort. Would Indian filmmakers even understand how to make such propaganda movies?

In 1939 the Defence of India Act was passed, giving unprecedented powers to the government to make rules ‘for the maintenance of public order’. In May 1942 a further notification brought the cinema into its purview. The ‘cinematograph’ was introduced squarely into the area of ‘Prevention of Prejudicial Acts and Control of Information’, and the screening of any ‘unauthorized cinematograph film containing any information likely to assist the enemy’ was banned.

The 1942 Rules did two additional things. First, they prohibited the exhibition of any film exceeding 11,000 feet in length, and any trailer of more than 400 feet. This was supposedly to do with rationing: raw stock was considered essential for the war effort, and stock would only be issued to licensed producers who had a previous track record of film production. And yet it was somewhat more complicated than that. To many in India, wartime rationing was but an excuse to make an aesthetic intervention, in the widely held belief that its films, with all their songs and dances, went on for far too long.

Next, the Rules also brought in a brand new category of officially ‘approved’ film that movie exhibitors were required compulsorily to show. The institutionally powerful definition of an ‘approved’ film was provided by the Film Advisory Board, founded in 1940 by the Ministry of Information and headed by Alexander Shaw, former Empire Marketing Board and Crown Film producer. The Board was meant to ‘advise on the making of propaganda shorts’, to collaborate with independent producers/financiers, and to oversee the distribution of indigenous and imported war propaganda films.

By 1942, in a year that saw the official launch of the Quit India movement, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Griersonian ‘democracy’ line was not going to work so easily in India. London’s Documentary News Letter reprinted an essay written by the major Indian author Nirad Chaudhuri warning that ‘those who are in charge of war propaganda in India could not commit a greater mistake than to regard themselves as the relaying agents of the British Ministry of Information’.

Realism to melodrama

This impasse would have a curious consequence that becomes evident as we turn to perhaps the three most unusual and influential films of the many that were made within the war-effort structure. These were, contrary to explicit rules of granting licences, their directors’ first films. Producers with no previous track record of film production were proposing them. None even remotely possessed anything like wartime content. And at least one of them was an explicitly political movie with a cause: a leftwing, radical cause.

So how come they were made within a war-effort aesthetic? In these films—K. A. Abbas’s cult debut Dharti Ke Lal/Children of the Earth, Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar/The Lower Depths, and legendary classical dancer Uday Shankar’s dance epic Kalpana, all released in 1946—we see the first significant arrival of a social realism in India. All three films were in some form on the political Left. All three were inspired in some way by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), a theatre movement initially affiliated to the Communist Party of India, launched formally in Bombay in 1943, with its manifesto calling for a ‘defence of culture against Imperialism and Fascism’, and one of them, Dharti Ke Lal, was directly produced by the IPTA.

Dharti Ke Lal, set during the great Bengal famine of 1943 that left five million dead despite the plentiful availability of grain, mainly through governmental callousness, was based on Bijon Bhattacharya’s landmark play Nabanna that inaugurated the radical theatre movement in Bengal. The film tells the story of a family of sharecroppers in Bengal. Despite a good harvest and rising grain prices during the war, they lose their property to a crooked grain-dealing landlord, and go to Calcutta along with thousands of similarly dispossessed peasants. Before dying, the patriarch enjoins his family to return to their native soil, where the farmers get together and, in a stridently celebratory socialist realist ending, opt for Soviet-style collective farming.

Although Chetan Anand’s film had no formal connection with the Indian People’s Theatre Association, it too staged several of its famous songs composed by the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar (Uday Shankar’s younger brother). A rich landowner lives on a mountain while the poor starve in a village in the valley below. The landowner’s sewage flows around the poor people’s huts, spreading disease.

The most curious example was Kalpana. The dancer Uday Shankar was by this time an iconic figure of Indian modernism, and the film itself something of an autobiographical fantasy of how he started his dance school in Almora. Shot in Madras’s Gemini Studios, with cinematography by the man who would later shoot the Indian cinema’s biggest dance spectacular ever (S. S. Vasan’s Chandralekha, 1948), the film is presented as an ode to the creative imagination, mobilizing the vocabulary of traditional dance, which doubles as a metaphor for the dreams invested in the soon-to-be independent India. The choreography was specifically designed for the camera, with expressionist angles and chiaroscuro effects, and became a model for numerous other dance spectaculars.

On the one hand, these films represent the kind of realist discipline that the British expected from their war propaganda. On the other hand, all three films are essentially realistic only on the surface: deep within, all three are melodramas. The realism lay in adapting a British documentary legacy to create what we might call the documentary-effect of stark realism. Of Dharti Ke Lal, K. A. Abbas writes that his original plan was to ‘do the entire outdoor shooting on Calcutta's pavements, and to stage the massive hunger march’. They could not do this because the city was still under military occupation, but they did take two shots, ‘one showing the hero … plying a rickshaw—and a shot of one of Chowringhee’s palatial hotels and the dustbins in front of it with some scrounging urchins around it, and with American GIs and British Tommies strolling by’. The rest of the film was shot on set.

A few years later, a new benchmark of such documentary realism would be set by Nemai Ghosh’s Bengali film Chinnamul/The Uprooted (1951), in telling its own story of the same 1943 famine. That film too was shot partly on set and made within the conventions of studio melodrama, but its most famous sequences showed actors mingling with real-life refugees at Calcutta’s Sealdah station, filmed with concealed cameras. Yet later, when Bimal Roy was shooting his own famine movie, Do Bigha Zameen (1953), in which its male protagonist and major movie star Balraj Sahni plays a rickshaw puller on location in Calcutta, Sahni wrote describing how the rickshaw pullers, believing him to be one of them, were deeply upset when they discovered that he was a movie star simply pretending.

Such documentary realism, imposed upon studio-derived fictional melodramas, evoked an effect that might well, in hindsight, be traceable to the ‘fakes’ of the First World War. Pretend-realism would take on a whole new dimension as we return, yet again, to V. Shantaram, who may well be seen to have best managed the negotiation into the colonially defined category of wartime propaganda, with Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani/The Immortal Story of Dr Kotnis (1946). This was a fictional rendition of a true story of an Indian doctor who travelled with a medical team sent by the Indian National Congress in 1939 to China in anti-fascist solidarity and support against the Japanese invasion. Dwarkanath Kotnis (played by Shantaram himself) goes to China, works almost singlehandedly to provide medical relief to the wounded, meets and marries a Chinese girl, Ching Lan (Jayashree), is captured by the Japanese (Figure 3), and eventually dies in battle while developing a cure against an epidemic. Ching Lan and their infant son return to India, symbolizing the solidarity of their nationalist struggles.

3. ‘Dizzying cultural displacements’: V. Shantaram, in the war movie Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani/The Immortal Story of Dr Kotnis (1946), alongside ‘Japanese’ soldiers. The film was entirely shot on set in Bombay.

For a war movie, the film is remarkable for its abandonment of any pretence at cinematic realism and its powerful nationalist rhetoric which culminates in the hero’s dying speech describing what his wife will see when she goes ‘home’. ‘As far as the British war effort project goes’, writes Neepa Majumdar, there is ‘very little in Kotnis to suggest the broader context of a global war that might satisfy British interests’. The ‘anti-Japanese rhetoric in the film is part of a generalized plea for freedom, which, in leaving the enemy unnamed, functioned as code for nationalist and anti-British sentiments’. Majumdar then shows how the film goes on to a ‘dizzying series of cultural displacements’: as for example in the bridal song sequence, where the ‘Indian actress Jayashree plays a Chinese nurse who mimics a Chinese bride, singing a song in Hindi that sounds “Chinese” based on Hollywood and British cinematic renditions of “Chinese” music’.

This, then, was a cinema where traditional Indian film historians signal the birth of a properly indigenous realism, a cinema on the Left and telling true stories of such scandalous events as the great famine of 1943. That it was perhaps also viewed as one of the successes of Britain’s policy for wartime propaganda speaks to the contradictions endemic to Indian cinema’s history.