Chapter 3
Partition and the ‘all-India’ film
A difficult birth
India officially became ‘independent’ in 1947, and a Republic in 1950. Neither were easy transitions. India’s traumatic Partition into multiple countries is a well-known story. Less well known are the many contradictions that jostled within a truncated republic as the Congress Party came to power under Jawaharlal Nehru. While Nehru’s Congress dominated India politically, it also experienced opposition, for example, in both Andhra Pradesh and Kerala from Communist Party uprisings; in Tamil Nadu from the anti-Brahmin and eventually anti-North Indian political opposition from the Dravidar Kazhagam, and by the princely state of Kashmir.
Apart from the pragmatic challenges of governance, the difficulty for Nehru’s administration was to prove India’s capacity to sustain a credible ideology of popular governance. Official state nationalism typically had little popular purchase, and was countered with alternative nationalisms, including smaller sub-nationalisms often beyond state control and antagonistic to it. The cinema would inherit all of India’s political contradictions. It would soon become apparent that India, once incapable of creating an empire film, was now equally unable to provide the newly free country with a properly nationalist cinema.
Many films sought to fill this vacuum, but few without deep ambiguity. A film celebrating the glorious Indian freedom struggle such as Phani Majumdar’s Andolan/The Revolution (1951, the unlikely debut of future singing star Kishore Kumar), based on a story by novelist Krishan Chander about a Bengali family between 1885, when the Indian National Congress was established, and independence in 1947, was exceptional.
Far more typically, nationalist sagas became a repudiation of what independent India had achieved. A ‘happy’ ending in a late 1940s‐1950s melodrama commonly required the hero and the heroine to walk away to discover their happiness elsewhere. In 1948, just a year after Independence, the major commercial hit was India’s major post-Independence movie star Dilip Kumar’s Shaheed/Martyr, which has the hero, son of a colonial policeman, join a group of radical nationalists, for which he is eventually hanged. When his childhood sweetheart (played by the emerging star Kamini Kaushal) also dies, the two are united only in death.
Nowhere was Indian nationalism more controversial than in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Cinematographer K. Ramnoth’s expressionist Tamil film Ezhai Padum Padu/Plight of the Poor (1950) adapted Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to tell the story of a petty thief (Telugu singing star Chittor V. Nagaiah in his best known screen appearance), who is arrested by a policeman working for the colonial administration. The film’s moral pivot occurs during an incident during the Independence struggle when the thief rescues the policeman, who then finds himself caught in the dilemma of having to work for an imperialist police force while being indebted to a former criminal.
Made two years later, Andaman Kaithi/Prisoner of the Andamans (1952) also tells of both Independence and Partition through the voice of a nationalist trade union leader who is in jail (an early role for future Tamil superstar M. G. Ramachandran). The film concerns a villainous collaborator with the British, who swindled his mother and killed his father. A significant part of the film invokes the Partition, and much of it is set within labour movements gaining ground and includes scenes of food shortage, unemployment, and strike calls.
In Telugu, Gudavalli Ramabrahmam began filming his big-budget Palnati Yuddham/Battle of Palnadu (1947), a costumed fantasy about warfare and rivalries that cause the splitting of the kingdom of Palnadu and numerous bloody caste and religious conflicts. The film made direct reference to India’s Partition and to the fate of a nation ‘whose soil has been converted into a rudrabhoomi [cremation ground] by the vengeful attitudes of warring brothers’. The film was completed by future producer and director L. V. Prasad, who followed up with his own political melodrama Manadesam/Our Country (also 1947), in which a fiery anti-Congress activist (Tamil and Telugu singing star Krishnaveni) falls in love, unfortunately for her, with a staunch nationalist. The film included several symbolic scenes including a bottle of liquor in front of a Gandhi portrait set to a Chittor V. Nagaiah song bemoaning the speed at which India forgot Gandhi’s teachings.
Bombay after the Second World War
Independent India’s cinema was in many ways more accurately a cinema about the Partition. Although its consequences were felt across the country, nowhere were they evidenced more than in Bombay. Some decades before Independence this city had become a magnet for migrant capital across South and West Asia. The Partition itself only enhanced this process, as all of Lahore’s three big studios (Shorey, Pancholi, and Leelamandir) closed down—reportedly in the face of threats and rioting mobs—their Hindu producers moving to Bombay with various unfinished projects.
Partition’s main consequence in offering a home for these migrants was to make Bombay’s cinema replace the Calcutta of the 19th-century popular print era, to become India’s most prominent example of illegitimate popular culture. Filmmakers, stars, composers, and most importantly new independent producers moved their businesses from across the subcontinent to Bombay, none more so than from North-West India.
To tackle this onslaught, the independent government of India would choose to retain regulatory mechanisms it inherited from the colonial administration, including several that had been originally devised for wartime propaganda. In January 1951, a brand new Central Censor Board was set up. The following year, 1952, the Indian Cinematograph Act was passed. It translated into the cinema the Constitutional requirement that the doctrine of free speech in India required ‘reasonable restrictions’. Such reasonable restrictions, according to the new Indian Constitution, included specific political limitations concerning India’s integrity and its relation with other countries, such as defamation, maintenance of public order, and the one that has generated the greatest controversy: ‘decency and morality’. With the Cinematograph Act, it would be up to the Censor Board to arbitrate on all these matters.
Several parts of the Cinematograph Act betray the strong legacy of 1930s Colonial Films Unit terminology. For example, one section on ‘issuing directions to licensees … for the purpose of regulating the exhibition of any film or class of films, so that scientific films, films intended for educational purposes, films dealing with news and current events, documentary films or indigenous films secure an adequate opportunity of being exhibited’ may well have been an early instance of cutting and pasting from a British Ministry of Information document.
The 1952 Act, along with several other official reports, now added up to a collective vision: one which would influentially define for the new Indian state what was wrong with its cinema, and what needed doing. A great deal of the disquiet that the independent Indian government felt about the negative impact of the cinema inherited statements that several nationalist leaders had made for decades. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, had fervently disliked the cinema, which he repeatedly described as not just doing evil, but as the very embodiment of evil. In 1928, declining to respond to the questionnaire sent him by the Indian Cinematograph Committee, he sent a two-line reply saying that even if he was so minded, he would be unfit to answer the questionnaire since he had never been to the cinema, but ‘even to an outsider, the evil that it has done and is doing is patent’, while ‘the good, if it has done any at all, remains to be proved’. Years later, in a much-quoted statement, he described modernity as a ‘raging fire’, surrounded by ‘the cinema, the stage, the race course, the drinking booth and the opium den—all these enemies of society that have sprung up under the fostering influence of the present system threaten us on all sides’.
Now, after Independence, the cinema industry presented India with a situation that a Film Inquiry Committee set up in 1951 frankly described as ‘alarming’. The problem, said the Committee, was not with the ‘net return to the industry’, which ‘might appear large on the basis of the capital invested’: it was in the inequality of its distribution. The position might have been satisfactory only if the ‘apparent prosperity were evenly distributed or equitably shared’. Unfortunately, it added, ‘probably no other industry present(s) such a picture of maladjustment in its component parts’. Although the problem was a long-standing one, its specific manifestation arose after the Second World War ended, and wartime restrictions were lifted, over a hundred new producers entered the field, and new films released numbered over 200 in 1946 and 283 in 1947.
It was true that the onslaught of new capital, largely viewed with suspicion by the state as ‘black’ money, had some visible consequences in the cinema. Its most direct consequence was the closure of several of the big interwar movie studios. Prabhat shut in Pune in 1953, New Theatres in Calcutta in 1955, and while Bombay Talkies and Ranjit Studios did limp through to the 1960s, they became primarily real estate for rent, making occasional productions rather than operating as full production houses.
At the same time, the number of films being made increased exponentially, confirming a widespread belief that India’s cinema production typically thrived on financial crisis. Earlier, during the Depression years of 1931‐2 in Bombay—which saw the rise of chronic indebtedness among Western India’s rural peasantry together with rising urban unemployment following closures in the textile industry—Hindi film production spiked from twenty-three films in 1931 to sixty-one (in 1932), to seventy-five (1933), and 121 (1934). And now, in the first two years since the war ended, the Hindi cinema alone jumped from seventy-three films in 1945 to 155 in 1946 and 183 in 1947.
Was such production a good thing, as many conventional economic indicators might have argued? Or was such overproduction precisely the problem, for a postwar nation-state struggling to bring things under its control, facing a crisis of economic legitimacy?
The star parade begins
These weren’t the only contradictions. The very time that the Indian government was viewing its film industry with alarm and concern also saw the arrival of the most famous stars, acting in the biggest movies, singing the most remembered songs ever in India’s history. The ‘Star Parade’ had begun.
Let us look only at the three years after the war, between 1946 and 1948. I shall take a somewhat arbitrary list by http://boxofficeindia.com of the big hits of these three years. This list is only indicative: the industry did not then have, or perhaps have at any time, any very sophisticated means for checking box office success. Then, as now, it relied on the proverbial ‘buzz’; and there was certainly a buzz around the films I highlight here.
Just for starters, the film star Dilip Kumar launched his career at this very time, with his first hit, Jugnu, and followed it up with Shaheed, which also launched the star pair of Kumar and Kamini Kaushal telling, as we have seen, a less-than-glorious story of Indian nationalism. Also released that year was Wadia Films’ Mela/Festival, once more with Kumar and singing star Nurjehan but also with another huge star name, Nargis. Mela was Nargis’s breakout hit, and she would dominate the coming decade with huge films with Raj Kapoor, eternal hits like Barsaat/Rain (1949), Awara/The Vagabond (1951), and Shri 420/Mr 420 (1955), for which see Figure 4.
4. Nargis and Raj Kapoor in Kapoor’s major countryside-to-city film Shri 420/Mr 420 (1955), the heyday of the 1950s musical.
In 1946 Mehboob’s blockbuster Anmol Ghadi/Invaluable Clock led the way, featuring the singing star Nurjehan in her biggest movie role and singing her most famous song, Aawaz de kahan hai/Call me, where are you.
And finally, 1948 also saw the debut of Dev Anand in Bombay Talkies’ Ziddi/The Stubborn One. Anand (see Figure 5) is often considered India’s Cary Grant, and fans have drawn attention to the unfairness of the comparison to Grant, who shares nothing of the sheer stature that Anand enjoyed in India over a sixty-year career.
5. Publicity ‘lobby card’ for Navketan’s noir hit Taxi Driver (1955), featuring movie icon Dev Anand.
And then there was the music. One of the two hits by Filmistan, the studio that broke from Bombay Talkies, was Do Bhai/Two Brothers, the breakthrough film of legendary Assamese composer Sachin Dev Burman. The second, Shehnai, brought in another big movie composer, C. Ramchandra, known mainly for introducing the era of swing and other jazz influences, and had the eternal song hit Aana meri jaan Sunday ke Sunday/Come my darling from Sunday to Sunday.
S. S. Vasan’s dance spectacular Chandralekha also came out in that year. Shot at a massive budget of Rs 3 million, this was the first major effort of a Madras-based studio to attempt an all-India distribution. Occasionally compared to The Prisoner of Zenda, its basic plot is one of sibling rivalry between two princes, with both the object of desire and bone of contention between them being state power, equated with the possession of the village maiden Chandralekha. The film’s big sequence was borrowed from the Ali Baba legend, in which the heroine agrees to marry the villain following an elaborate drum dance. The enormous drums, in the Indian cinema’s most anthologized sequence, contain the hero’s soldiers, who burst out after the dance, overwhelming the baddies. This dramatic sequence is followed by what must be the longest sword duel anywhere in the cinema.
Was this really India’s ‘low period’—a time when the films being made ‘discredit [the public’s] intelligence [and] also enhance their reputation for credulity and submission to make-believe’, as the Inquiry Committee report of 1951 tells us?
Independent India’s relationship to its movies in the 1950s was unique in world cinema history. No other former third-world country had a movie industry of this scale preceding its own political independence, and none viewed its cinema with such suspicion. Whereas to most third-world countries, the setting up of an indigenous popular cinematic culture capable of withstanding Hollywood would have been something of a priority for realizing independence, India, which possessed such a cinema, remained at best sceptical about this astonishing gift horse. The suspicion was mutual: if independent India did not think much of its popular cinema, its cinema too, it appeared, often didn’t think much about India’s independence.
Film music
Clearly the period 1946‐8, if the films I have listed are any indication, witnessed change of a very significant kind in Indian cinema. Here was a new generation of movie stars: names like Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand, Nurjehan, Kamini Kaushal, Suraiya, and Nargis.
Inseparable from the star was the music. This was also the golden era of the music composer, especially Naushad, one of the most important figures in Indian film music, then at the zenith of his career. Bringing the two together—the stars and the composers—were technological developments that India would soon appropriate for its own uses. The arrival of separate soundtracks that could be recorded, mixed, and then ‘married’ to the optical print allowed for two major new cinematic practices that India would make all its own. The first was dubbing: Indian cinema would en masse post-dub everything, being only one of two countries worldwide to make an aesthetic practice of it (the other being Italy). And the second, yet more famously, was the use of playback singing.
Although it was occasionally the case that stars being dubbed—either in speech or song—by the voices of others was kept a secret, the arrival of playback reversed the situation. Names of playback singers such as Lata Mangeshkar, Geeta Dutt, and Asha Bhonsle, Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh, Manna Dey, and Kishore Kumar often appeared larger than the stars who mouthed their voices. Their songs were advertised, their names prominently displayed on the film credits. And most major stars would be inseparably linked to specific playback singers: Dev Anand with the singer Kishore Kumar, Raj Kapoor with Mukesh, Dilip Kumar with Rafi.
By the late 1940s, the sale of a film’s music would become a key factor in the success of the film itself. This was partly through vinyl, with the Gramophone Company of India (originally set up as a branch of EMI, London, in 1901, turned into an independent company in 1946) leading the way.
Here too there was a problem for governmental regulators. The Indian state could not control the growth or the popularity of film, but it could try to ensure that state media would remain uncontaminated. Radio was the key means for dissemination of popular music, but for several years All India Radio’s policy, attributed to the early 1950s Minister of Information & Broadcasting, B. V. Keskar, had been to keep the vulgarizing influence of film music out. It was only after the neighbouring country’s Radio Ceylon started broadcasting Hindi film music, which the Indian public struggled to receive on shortwave transmitters, that the popular commercial channel Vividh Bharathi, featuring film music, was launched in 1957.
The financier mode
These were undoubtedly major transformations for the Indian cinema, and yet there is significant disconnect between governmental concern and the view of both current audiences and future historians, as to what was happening. In our 1946‐8 list, only three of the films were made by the big prewar studios, whereas six represent a new generation of individual producer-directors: the Raj Kapoors, the A. R. Kardars, the Mehboobs, and the K. Amarnaths of the postwar era.Three very famous individuals inaugurated a new and influential category of the producer-impresario in 1942, at the height of the war. The first was V. Shantaram—that man again—who walked out of the Prabhat Studio, apparently without much warning and at a time when it was still doing well, to set up his own studio, Rajkamal Kalamandir, as a proprietorship, funded by someone whom his later biographers only identify as a ‘Delhi-based financier named Gupta’. The second was Mehboob Khan, who similarly left the Sagar Film Company to set up his own space in some chawls (tenements), funded by a man whom his biographer Bunny Reuben simply names as ‘Lalaji of Manoranjan Pictures, Delhi’. And the third was Bombay Talkies producer S. Mukherjee, who with financier Chunilal and leading movie star Ashok Kumar together started the Filmistan Studio.
By the late 1940s the change was clear. In 1948 Raj Kapoor set up perhaps the most important of the new-era production houses when he mortgaged his car and borrowed money from his servant to make the first reels of Aag/Fire (1947) at his own cost. Kapoor would extend this into his own studio, and make all his major melodramas here.
Dev Anand, likewise, launched his own production house Navketan in 1949. Famous as Dev Anand himself is, equally important was the signature style of Navketan, the crime musical, often made by his brothers Chetan Anand (Taxi Driver, 1955; see Figure 5) and Vijay Anand (Kala Bazaar/Black Market, 1960), along with an astonishing wealth of directorial talent including Indian cinema’s leading melodramatist, Guru Dutt, who made his first film, Baazi/Gambler (1951), there. Baazi has Dev Anand play a small-time gambler forced into working for the owner of the Star Hotel, a mysterious and shadowy criminal, played by the epitome of Hindi screen villainy, K. N. Singh, and a cabaret dancer (played by Geeta Bali), who is killed.
This—the arrival of glamorous producer-entrepreneurs, and behind them their shadowy backers, the mysterious Lalajis and Guptas—was the change that the government of India’s Inquiry Committee of 1951 felt was change for the worse.
The ‘all-India film’
Independent India’s condemnation of the cinema as an industry in inexorable decline, incapable of playing any constructive role in the nation-to-be, saw almost all of Indian cinema tarnished as though with a single brush: to be held in a contempt not unlike that shown in British documentarist Alexander Shaw’s denunciation of all Indian films as nothing but ‘hundreds of feet of leering, posturing pretty-pretties’. Both the idea of national reform and the denunciation of low culture had clear colonial antecedents, and neither permitted postwar Bombay cinema to be seen for what it indeed was—a complex negotiation of the cultures and economies of Partition.
Bombay, as India’s undeclared entertainment capital, home of its biggest film industry, radiated its impact in the decade after Independence, as it set up a complex exhibition network that would reach every corner of the country. There were very few distributors who had nationwide networks. Most distributors were regionally organized, and they in turn negotiated with local exhibitors who ran the movie houses, collected their box office receipts, and paid entertainment tax. There were various contractual systems by which major films would be sold. Producers would commonly receive advances from distributors in return for privileged rights, unless they had the money to make the film on their own, which allowed them to drive harder bargains later on. Exhibitors, on the other end of the chain, would also feed the 16 millimetre circuits, which is where any film would typically end its life.
One of the first to attribute a political agenda to such a complex mode of dissemination was the film historian Chidananda Das Gupta, who named this entire enterprise the ‘all-India film’. The Hindi omnibus song-dance spectacular was, he said, a form that appropriated aspects both from indigenous popular film and theatre genres and from Hollywood. What was important was how it subordinated them to an all-encompassing entertainment formula designed to overcome regional and linguistic boundaries. Das Gupta now ascribed to this formula a default function: of providing a ‘cultural leadership [that reinforces] some of the unifying tendencies in our social and economic changes’. In doing so, it also found itself providing ‘an inferior alternative [to a leadership that] has not emerged because of the hiatus between the intelligentsia, to which the leaders belong, and the masses’.
Such a claim for a national cinema came, in contrast to almost anywhere else on earth, from bottom-up: it arose illegitimately, as a claim that emerged from the market and almost beneath the radar of state supervision. As had happened with the swadeshi movement, so now, it was as though the cinema found itself being force-fitted into a political role. While in the early 1950s, such a conception of an ‘all-India film’ could only exist in the films made in Bombay and to a lesser extent in Madras, within the decade, emerging film industries across India would lay their own claims to making their own versions of a national film.
Through the 1950s a growing number of films showed, in one way or other, the links between Bombay and different parts of India, as the cinema of this city saw a flowering of different styles, each making its own claims for ‘all-India film’ status with whatever degree of legitimacy it could muster. Even as the Bombay cinema developed different ‘schools’ of great music composers—a Bombay group (comprising Naushad, Anil Biswas, Khemchand Prakash, and C. Ramchandra), a Lahore group (Ghulam Haider, Shyam Sunder, and others), and a Calcutta group (R. C. Boral, Timir Baran)—post-Independence India too saw at least three schools of ‘national’ Bombay movie-making, all claiming some form of a ‘national’ cinema status, all existing with no support from the independent nation.
Perhaps the most successful, in the blockbuster releases I have listed, was the Lahore School. Through the war Bombay became home to a massive influx of Lahorites—directors, stars, and composers. Their influence would be profound. It has often been said that Bombay’s Hindi cinema itself is nothing but a cinema of a Punjabi diaspora, with its sagas of twins separated at birth, family feuds resolved by matriarchal diktat, and wives performing rituals praying for the longevity of their husbands. Although several names come to mind—directors like Ramanand Sagar and B. R. Chopra, stars such as Geeta Bali, Kamini Kaushal, and Rajendra Kumar, and composers like O. P. Nayyar—none is more iconic of the Lahore idiom than perhaps India’s most successful filmmaker, Yash Chopra.
Typical of Chopra’s best known films is the plush, soft-focus, upper-class love story, with young love battling against family honour embodied by the mother, repeatedly returning to the idiom of Punjabi nostalgia. Well into the 2000s, Chopra adhered to this form with major hits perpetuating nostalgia: such as the Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge/The Braveheart Gets the Bride (1995) set partly in London and mostly in the fields of Punjab, and Veer Zaara (2004), a star-crossed romance between an Indian Air Force pilot and a Pakistani woman from a rich political family of Lahore.
Then there was the Madras School. Vasan’s Gemini Studio had begun to make Tamil films far earlier, but made its serious bid for all-India status in the Hindi cinema after the making and national release of Chandralekha. Vasan now scaled up the studio practice of multilingual productions—of the same film shot simultaneously in two or more languages, sometimes with a different cast—to make massive trilinguals, starting with Apoorva Sahodarargal/Rare Brothers (1949), adapting the Douglas Fairbanks Jr hit The Corsican Brothers (1941), that established the studio’s dominance in the genre of the costumed adventure movie.
Many studios of the time, especially AVM and Prasad, followed Gemini’s lead, and indeed the entry of the ‘all-India film’ idiom into 1980s and 1990s Madras is evinced as much by the famous Jeetendra-Sridevi movies of the 1980s (such as the Padmalaya Studios’ Himmatwala/The Braveheart, 1983) as by the more famous Hindi films of Tamil director Mani Rathnam.
And finally, there was a Bengal School. Technically we could trace it back to 1942, when New Theatres’ frontline director Nitin Bose left for Bombay. Bose however did not have a very successful career there, although he did sign one of the biggest hits of post-Independence India, Ganga Jumna (1961), in which Dilip Kumar played a double role of two brothers, one a policeman and the other a bandit. The more important influence was that of cinematographer and director Bimal Roy, who moved to Bombay in 1944. In Calcutta Roy had shot several of P. C. Barua’s key films. In Bombay he made a series of classics like the realist Do Bigha Zameen/Two Acres of Land (1953), the ghost movie Madhumati (1958), and the story of inter-caste love, Sujata (1959).
In January 1952, the first International Film Festival of India was held, which was also the first ‘official’ occasion when the Indian state could showcase its cinema. The official Indian selections were Raj Kapoor’s Awara, V. Shantaram’s Amar Bhoopali/The Immortal Song, K. V. Reddy’s breakout hit starring N. T. Rama Rao, Pathala Bhairavi/The Goddess of Erebus (1951), a swashbuckling action fantasy that would be locally named the ‘folklore’ film at Vijaya Studio, and Agradoot’s Bengali melodrama Babla (all made in 1951).
All of these films might have been susceptible to the ‘fall in taste’ argument of the Government’s S. K. Patil Report, all four being musicals, and as mainstream a cinema as you could have got that year. Nevertheless, there appeared to be some tacit official recognition of their ‘all-India film’ credentials and those of their producer/director/star frontmen—sufficient, at least, to show them in this festival as Indian films its state could be proud of.
The independent auteur
We have to make a considerable shift in register to address the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Ray stands in curious relationship to this entire history: as though somehow at once outside and beyond it. For one, Ray’s sheer pedigree would separate him from the rest of the Indian movie industry of his time. His family, which included a famous grandfather, entrepreneur and writer/artist Upendrakishore Ray Choudhury, and an even more famous father, satirist Sukumar Ray, were prominent members of the liberal-reformist Brahmo Samaj. His personal training was at Shantiniketan, the alternative university set up by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. Ray studied at its art school, the Kala Bhavana, under its legendary teacher Nandlal Bose, after which he became a noted graphic artist in Calcutta. Clearly, Ray had something new to offer to the cinema, including a desire to make films with real people, in real surroundings, inspired by a variety of world cinema influences including the French, Italian, and Japanese, mediated by the Calcutta Film Society that he co-founded in 1947.
The Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali/Song of the Road, Aparajito/The Unvanquished, 1956, Apur Sansar/The World of Apu, 1959), which tells the story of the growth of a young village boy, Apu, to manhood, has been among the most discussed and most celebrated films in Indian history. Widely acknowledged as unprecedented, there has been no settled debate as to how precisely they should be viewed. Within Bengal, their adaptation of a famous literary work by novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, followed by several subsequent literary adaptations by Ray, for example of Tagore’s writings (most notably Charulata, 1964), intervened in and fundamentally transformed the legacy of the boi, or literary cinema, inaugurated by New Theatres. Internationally they have been viewed as making a ‘neorealism the Italians did not know how to make’ (by Italian filmmaker Cesare Zavattini), and so reflecting a lyrical internationalist humanism that placed Ray alongside a group of non-Western directors brought together by their ability to rise beyond the crippling divides that beset the postwar ‘third’ world. By contrast, the work has also been read as profoundly Indian, profoundly Bengali even, and questions raised about the qualifications of interpreters unfamiliar with its local meanings.
Ray himself made clear his own preferences for how he wanted to be viewed some years before he made his first film. He certainly saw his cinema as without precedent in India. This was clearly a modernist claim for an originary moment, and even as such was susceptible to historicization: both interwar auteurs Shantaram and Barua had, for instance, made more or less the same claim for themselves. Ray’s own claim was thus one of many, making a bid for a national cinema. Ray’s however differed from the others’ in that it was not a claim for national authenticity, although authenticity would later be a major prism for reading Ray’s works: it was more a claim to a national-modern. Further, it was a claim that needed to be negotiated as a delicate manoeuvre between two contradictory frames: that of an individuated author, and that of an author speaking from within—even addressing—a film industry.
Although Ray has effectively been appropriated by the Indian state, and more particularly by the state of West Bengal, that endorsement of the Indian nation has been at best rocky, and contested by other claims being made for national representation at that time (see Figures 6 and 7, which illustrate mutually exclusive options on candidates for an Indian national cinema). A particularly evocative instance was the response of the movie star Nargis, who had played the leading role as wife and mother in Mehboob’s seminal film Mother India, in 1955, the same year as Pather Panchali, and who therefore had special qualifications to speak on national representation. Some years later, in her capacity as a Member of Parliament, Nargis would mount a scathing attack on Ray’s films, one that Salman Rushdie cited in some detail in his Imaginary Homelands:
6. The child Durga (Uma Dasgupta), sister of Apu, in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali/Song of the Road (1955).
7. Nargis, playing Radha, with Master Sajid and Master Surendra playing her two children, in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1955).
Nargis: Why do you think films like Pather Panchali become popular abroad? … Because people there want to see India in an abject condition. That is the image they have of our country and a film that confirms that image seems to them authentic.
Interviewer: But why should a renowned director like Ray do such a thing?
Nargis: To win awards. His films are not commercially successful. They only win awards … What I want is that if Mr Ray projects Indian poverty abroad, he should also show ‘Modern India’.
Interviewer: What is ‘Modern India’?
Nargis: Dams …
There was an ocean of difference between Ray’s ambition and that of Mehboob, and yet there is something of significance in Nargis’s parliamentary attack on him. Mother India was a remake of an earlier Mehboob film named Aurat/Woman (1940), and whereas the earlier film was a more realist rendition perhaps more appropriate to wartime India, the later film was designed as a full-scale nationalist epic. In both films the heroine works to pay off the villainous moneylender when her husband leaves. In the remake, however, as she remembers her past, she speaks from a modern India now full of tractors and dams. Facing a rebellious son who has abducted a woman, the mother kills him, and his blood is shown fertilizing the soil of a new India.
It appeared, then, that the Indian state had a choice to make from at least two mutually exclusive options as possible candidates for a national cinema. The decision wasn’t one that could be easily made, for it had to be as much about industrial reform as about aesthetics. It is salutary to remember, even as Ray’s Pather Panchali is claimed as a production of the ‘Government of West Bengal’, that he got that support mainly because (as his biographer Marie Seton notes) his mother knew a ‘Mrs. S’ who gave him access to Dr B. C. Roy, Chief Minister of West Bengal, who in turn misunderstood the film sufficiently (he thought it was about road building) to give him a grant from a Community Development Project.
More importantly, Seton points out that in making the film, Ray, for all his seeming antipathy to the mainstream industry, did approach—as young filmmakers of his time had to do—a dozen producers, including ‘all the top people’ in Bengal cinema, including the owners of New Theatre Studios, who were ‘generally considered to have produced the best films’. And when he was unsuccessful in raising any money from them, he dealt with ‘a shady class of brokers who announced that they specialized in film finance’, who ‘appeared with suggestions that this or that person would finance the completion of the film’ and ‘promised that for a commission they would introduce these people to Ray’.
It is also of significance that, right after Pather Panchali and its extraordinary sequel Aparajito, Ray chose to make the lowbrow comedy Parash Pathar/The Philosopher’s Stone with virtuoso Bengal comedian Tulsi Chakraborty, and to remember that along with his other considerable achievements is also this one: he is the most commercially successful filmmaker in the Bengali cinema’s history.
It makes more sense to see Ray and Mehboob, then, not so much in opposition to each other in their contrary claims for national recognition, but as opening two different trajectories for the national-modern at that particular moment in independent India. Ray here stands most fruitfully alongside another filmmaker from the Bombay industry, his contemporary Guru Dutt. Putting the two together allows us to consider the particular problem of the independent cinema in independent India: the perilous cinematic existence of the modern almost entirely outside of state support, whether you worked within the industry or outside it. This trajectory, forcing filmmakers wherever they were situated to make a cinema that was often at odds with the kind of finance they could receive, saw many major films remain unmade or abandoned. It was a crisis directly inherited from colonial times, but for which the new nation-state appeared to have no new solutions to offer.
Ray was the last remnant of a Bengal Renaissance that stretched back to the late 19th century. Dutt was at the other extreme, a pure product of the discredited Bombay movie industry: an actor and then director with Dev Anand in the Navketan production house making crime movies and later an independent producer of frothy comedies. Initially the two couldn’t have been more different in their credentials to produce a national-modern. In 1957, however, Guru Dutt launched an entirely new dimension to his work. The darkly romantic Pyaasa/The Thirsty One (1957) brought a muted social critique that would veer towards tragedy with a cycle of films that remain without doubt India’s most spectacular achievements in melodrama. In Pyaasa, an unsuccessful poet and displaced romantic artist sees his poetry sold as waste paper. Unable to bear the reigning philistinism, he elects to live on the streets where a young prostitute falls in love with him. Eventually, when the poet is believed dead, his book of poems turns out to be a best-seller. All those who previously rejected him now gather to pay tribute to the dead poet, at which point he disrupts the celebration with a passionate song denouncing hypocrisy and calls for the violent destruction of a corrupt world (Jala do ise phook dalo yeh duniya/Burn this earth blow it away).
Dutt wrote that the inspiration for this film came from the ancient poem, ‘Seven Grecian cities claimed great Homer dead/Through which, in vain, he living begged his bread’. To Dutt it encapsulated the emotional and social complexities that followed a disintegration of Nehru’s nationalism under the twin pressures of industrialism and urbanization, at one level creating the space for Indian modernism but also generating immense social dislocation on another. His scathing self-produced melodramas of the late 1950s were squarely within the Bombay film industry and, as such, would still have been tarnished by the post-Patil Report denigration of the mainstream cinemas of Bombay.
Dutt is today acknowledged as a cinematic master, one of the auteurs of the post-Independence Indian cinema. However, neither Dutt nor another major name, Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, enjoyed that accolade in their own lifetime. Ghatak’s cycle of films between the mid-1950s and early 1960s mounted a new investigation into film form, shaped by the political framework of the Second World War, the 1943 Bengal famine, and, above all, Partition. His focus in his best-known cycle of films, Meghe Dhaka Tara/Cloud Capped Star (1960), Komal Gandhar/E-Flat (1961), and Subarnarekha/The Golden Line (1962), was on expanding the refugee experience into a universalized leitmotif of cultural dismemberment and exile evoking an epic tradition in densely textured stories drawing on tribal, folk, and classical forms.
The very fact that Dutt’s and Ghatak’s melodramas are more acceptable today, and these filmmakers acknowledged as stylists on a par with all of India’s modern masters in cinema, painting, and literature, provides us with a retrospective chronicle of the limitations of Indian modernism itself as it came about within postcolonial India. These two filmmakers become examples of what else the Indian cinema has done, other than become socially responsible and realistic; and they also provide other reasons for why the cinema has existed than merely as a vehicle for social improvement.
Once we make this shift, and open the boundaries that define cinematic excellence in other ways, a startlingly diverse set of filmmakers spring into focus. Many of them were producer-directors who came closest to defining for India an independent cinema, before the state stepped in in 1969 with its New Cinema policies. Our shift also allows us to show how such individual auteurs defined local industries as they emerged from out of the shadow of Bombay.