Producing a reference work about a national cinema is an uncomfortable project. Both Seamus Deane, an Irish intellectual, and Aijaz Ahmad, a subcontinental intellectual, have produced powerful critiques of the very attempts to provide a history of any particular art-form presented in terms of a nation-state’s achievements. Deane’s ‘Critical Reflections’ in Artforum of December 1993 argue the case in relation to the construction of national art histories. Ahmad’s ‘Indian Literature: Notes Towards the Definition of a Category’, reprinted in his book In Theory (1992, pp. 243–85), examines the (im)possibility of there being a national Indian literary history. Ahmad points out that, even should the legitimacy of a category such as Indian literature be granted, it would have to encompass such diverse histories in so many languages tied to geographical terrains with constantly shifting boundaries that no single scholar can ever claim to practise the discipline of Indian literature. Furthermore, the territorial unity that can readily, though abusively, be imagined for German, French, US or Japanese cinemas and literatures, cannot be fantasised for India without restricting the terrain and the period to an absurdly small fragment of what should be addressed if we are to make any kind of sense of the cultural productions at issue. To restrict an account of Indian cinema to the geo-temporal frame constituted by the Indian nation-state since Independence or, more accurately, since Partition, would require us to ignore some of the most admirable cinematic achievements realised in Colonial India. More damagingly, it would also rule out any engagement with the longer-term dynamics which have shaped post-Partition Indian cinema.
Even if it were thought to be desirable, a rigorously ‘nation-state’ approach to Indian cinema, or to any other art-form, cannot be sustained. If we put the emphasis on ‘nation’ rather than on ‘state’, the problems only multiply. In other words, there is no sense of Indianness, nor of any other so-called national identity, that precedes the forms of historical and personal experience or expression given shape by particular, geographically and historically bounded institutions of government, by particular state forms providing and enforcing, and always necessarily falling short of doing so homogeneously, both geographical limits and social stratifications. Nations are retroactive, not retrospective constructions to which we are invited, often not very subtly, to adhere. Seamus Deane notes that ‘the most essentialist figurings of history … depend upon making an intersection between time and space, between chronology and territory. This is a feature of all writings that aim to provide a history of an art-form, of a literature, of a nation-state’s achievement in the arts.’ He goes on to ask:
Is it possible to write a history of any form of ‘Art’, is it possible to locate it territorially, and at the same time to be free of any conception of art that is not at least implicitly essentialist and therefore subversive of the very idea and form of history - that is not in some sense either reactionary or ancestral in its longings, and, ultimately, impassive toward all forms of exposition or explanation?
In this respect, a reference work is no different from a historical account: both construct what they purport to address.
Deane’s questions go to the heart of the matter. It may not be an accident that an Irish intellectual talking about ‘Irish Art’ should ask questions so pertinent to the very desire of producing a book about Indian cinema. As an intellectual marked by the history of the island of Ireland, including the experience of colonialism, post-colonialism and Partition, Deane’s thought has a definite resonance for those who address notions of Indian art-forms.
A book purporting to be, however imperfectly, an encyclopaedia of Indian cinema(s) cannot but lay itself open to all the criticisms and strictures formulated by Deane and Ahmad. The very enterprise of compiling such an encyclopaedia is inevitably caught in the tensions, fantasies and, not to put too fine a point on it, the traps they describe. If the category of Indian cinema cannot be restricted to post-Partition India, neither can it be made to coincide with any definition of pre-Partition or of Colonial India. Any such definition would include all or part of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and various bits and pieces of geography beyond the current borders of the Indian Republic. As even a cursory glance at the Chronicle in this book will make clear, the boundaries and composition of the Indian State have varied a great deal over the years. In addition, the cultural divisions between Indian cinema and other cinemas have been very flexible as well. To give but one example, and the editors of this book have debated the point, the beginnings of Iranian sound cinema could be seen as part of Indian cinema: Ardeshir Irani, the director of Alam Ara, also made the Persian film, Dokhtar-e-Lor, in 1933 in Bombay, commonly acknowledged as the first Iranian sound feature, a fact celebrated in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Nassereddin Shah Actor-e-Cinema (Once Upon a Time Cinema, 1992).
Any account of Indian cinema cannot but run the risk of essentialism as outlined by Deane, including its reactionary aspects and distasteful ancestral longings. To acknowledge, with Ahmad, that the art-form defined under such murky circumstances is always too diverse to fit neatly under any label that could be affixed to it, is small comfort, especially in the context of contemporary India where the risks to life and limb of ancestral longings and essentialism are so gruesomely made real. In such a context, it is not enough simply to point out that India is and always was plural and diverse and that any attempt to essentialise it, to force a coincidence between territory and chronology, or between nation, ethnicity, religion and state, is un-Indian (in the sense that it betrays the struggle which achieved an independent state in the first place) as well as murderous.
Deane tries to think his way through the problem of the ‘national’ art-form by invoking feminism: ‘It is a crux of feminist theory that essentialism must be both accepted and confronted, cancelled, erased.’ The present work on Indian cinema tries to learn this lesson from feminist theory, especially as formulated by, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who described the ‘risk of essence’ in terms of the need to acknowledge ‘the dangerousness of something one cannot not use’ (Outside in the Teaching Machine, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 5).
On the one hand, essentialism is evoked and confronted in the attempt to offer a fairly comprehensive though no doubt seriously flawed introduction to an All-Indian cinematic history. It is All-Indian not in the sense of stressing a common denominator or in the negative acceptance of the term discussed in our entry on All-Indian Film, but in its attempt to engage with the film cultures that arose in all parts of India, rather than to privilege the Hindi cinema, and to give them space in accordance with their relative weight in Indian cinema as a whole. This strategy necessarily involves making judgments, and equally necessarily means getting some of the judgments wrong. So be it. Other books with similar aims will provide correctives and future, corrected and up-dated editions of this first effort will do likewise.
On the other hand, essentialism has been erased both in the critical methodology, which is consciously hybrid and ‘impure’, calling on knowledges, values and conceptual tools which are neither nativist nor rootlessly cosmopolitan, and in the scope of the book which unapologetically includes artists and films that could be claimed by Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore or even by Hollywood (Ellis Duncan) or Germany (Franz Osten, Paul Zils). The editors do not wish to suggest that these other national cinemas would be wrong to make such claims. It is just that Indian cinema is incomprehensible without the inclusion of these artists and films in the same way that Pakistani or Bangladeshi cinema cannot be understood without taking into account the work of artists commonly regarded as part of Indian cinema.
The editors have taken the risk, described by Deane, of ‘going through essentialism, re-tracing the journey as much as possible against the grain of the received pattern while still accepting that pattern as given, in order ultimately to replace it with something that is not essentialist, univocal, coercive’. In this task, we have been greatly helped by many scholars whose expertise in the many different Indian cinemas and cultures has made the editors acutely aware of the impossibility of mastering, unifying and essentialising Indian cinema as an artform coinciding with both a singular territory and chronology.
We have taken ‘India’, not as a fixed entity, but as a socio-cultural process, a changing and contested set of overlapping frameworks (always temporarily) stabilised by governmental institutions, be they the Colonial administration, the Indian government or the various institutions seeking to regulate (or deregulate, which is only a different type of regulation) the interface between culture and economy within, at any given time, specific territorial limits. In the end, our main guideline has been to focus on the works, the artists and the institutions which have addressed Indian cinema as a constituent part of ‘India’ as a socio-cultural process.
Paul Willemen
London, May 1994