Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony 9780231553902

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A RT C I N E M A A N D I N DIA’ S F OR G OT T E N F U T U R E S

A RT C I N E M A A N D   I N DIA’ S F OR G OT T E N F U T U R E S Film and History in the Postcolony

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Majumdar, Rochona, author. Title: Art cinema and India's forgotten futures : film and history in the postcolony / Rochona Majumdar. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021002487 (print) | LCCN 2021002488 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231201049 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231201056 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231553902 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ghatak, Ritwikkumar, 1925–1976. | Sen, Mrinal, 1923–2018. | Ray, Satyajit, 1921–1992. | New wave films—India—History and criticism. | Postcolonialism in motion pictures. | Motion picture producers and directors—India. | Motion pictures—India—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.I8 M346 2022 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.I8 (ebook) | DDC 791.430954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002487 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002488

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover image: Courtesy of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI)

For Dipesh Chakrabarty •

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

PART I: THE HISTORY OF ART CINEMA

1. Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category 25 2. The “New” Indian Cinema: Journeys of the Art Film

53

3. Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement 92 PART II: ART FILMS AS HISTORY

4. Ritwik Ghatak and the Overcoming of History 127 5. “Anger and After”: History, Political Cinema, and Mrinal Sen 154 6. The Untimely Filmmaker: Ray’s City Trilogy and a Crisis of Historicism 189 Epilogue: Art Cinema and Our Present

223

viii

Contents

Acknowledgments 231 Notes 235 Select Bibliography 281 Index 295

A RT C I N E M A A N D I N DIA’ S F OR G OT T E N F U T U R E S

INTRODUCTION

A

rt cinema is a category of global provenance—this book is a history of that global art cinema in independent India. It is also a book about art cinema as a mode of doing history in a postcolonial setting. Indian art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, I argue, developed narrative and aesthetic strategies that anticipated the various critiques of the nation that postcolonial, feminist, and other radical historiographies developed in the 1980s and 1990s. How did cinema anticipate this historiography? And why is that story significant today? Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures is my attempt to raise and answer these questions. Whether film merits the status of an art is a question that was posed repeatedly, across different national and international contexts, in the twentieth century.1 The conditions under which it was posed, however, were specific to particular histories, and so too were the responses, values, aspirations, and attachments surrounding the projects of establishing film as an art. In this book, I argue that Indian art cinema emerged and grew into a distinct category as a mode of historical understanding at a moment when both the dominant narratives of the nation-state and of its modernization were beginning to stagnate, if not unravel. The art cinema project was tied up with the history of the independent Indian nation. Starting around the same time as the country’s decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s, an aspiration and an enthusiasm to help build a new nation and fashion modern citizens fueled Indian art cinema. Through “good films” and a cine culture that was painstakingly built around a nationalizing ideal,

2

Introduction

Indian art cinema sought to understand and communicate a sense of the postcolonial present that, despite bearing the scars of colonialism, was nevertheless poised toward a future of progress and development. During the 1960s, the sense of historical time that underpinned this naturalized sense of historical transition lost its spell for several Indian filmmakers, three of whom are widely regarded as the founding figures of Indian art cinema: Satyajit Ray (1921–1992), Mrinal Sen (1923–2018), and Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976); they are the subject of the second part of this book. In the wake of this disillusionment, their films sought to apprehend a sense of the postcolonial present as a new “regime of historicity,” whose relationship to historical time had to be radically reconfigured.2 “Apprehension” is a key term here. As Lisa Wedeen argues, it invokes three sets of meanings: of arrest and capture; of understanding and perception; and of anxiety usually mixed in with a sense of dread about the future.3 All of these senses are at work in the ways that Indian art cinema apprehended the postcolonial present and the possible futures intimated therein. In India, film’s claim to distinction as an art lay above all in the medium’s capacity to think thus about time—as, at first, drenched with a progressive sense of history and, subsequently, as unshackled from known teleologies, whether liberal or socialist. A dynamic attunement to temporality constituted art cinema as a mode of postcolonial historical understanding. The position of art cinema in the 1960s, as I describe it here, is thus more radical than its break with a history of established cinematic form and practice. My own training as a historian occurred in the 1990s during a radical turn in South Asian history when the existing debates around India’s transition to modernity were fundamentally recast. These new turns in historical thinking had ramifications for writing about the modern condition—not only India’s but also that of other parts of the global South. At the core of these revisionist positions was a new understanding of the postcolonial present: not as a site of lack—lacking in modernity—but as a scene for many different potentialities which did not map neatly onto received teleologies of progress, development, and modernization. Vitalized by the post-structural, postcolonial, and new historicist turns, historians offered robust critiques of conventional notions of progress, speaking instead of multiple, alternative, and early modernities, and of different ways of being in the world.4 As I studied Indian films, filmmakers, and film societies, I realized with some surprise that such varied perspectives had already been conveyed in a body of art films almost twenty-five years before this new historiography of the subcontinent emerged. But that left a question. How and why did some films and filmmakers come to an understanding of India’s postcolonial condition long before historians? Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures is not least an effort to work out this puzzle.5

Introduction

3

The “rationale for the postcolonial reinterrogation and recharacterization of the colonial past,” David Scott writes, “has rightly been that it will enable some critical purchase on the present.”6 In the early years of postcolonial nations, when the aura of decolonization was yet undiminished, the critical purchase of progressive ideologies such as “Marxisms, Fanonian liberationisms, [and] indigenous socialisms” in understanding the connections between colonial pasts and postcolonial presents (and futures) had been significant. But the “anticolonial utopias” imagined by these ideologies morphed into “postcolonial nightmares” as the new nations failed to address mass poverty, hunger, unequal distribution of wealth and income, unemployment, urbanization, and other related problems. As hope about the future of the nation began to wither, the teleological certitude underpinning various progressive ideologies was badly shaken. Put differently, the presents to whose aid and understanding historians galvanized these ideological understandings of the past were themselves insufficiently theorized.7 Instead of regarding the present as the terminus of a known trajectory, Scott proposes that it be regarded as a “problem space”: “an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.”8 Art cinema in India is such a problem space. Prefiguring postcolonial theoretical works by decades, and unconstrained by the connections between the past-present-future of the aforementioned liberationist ideologies, art films became histories of their present that, in their steadfast commitment to capturing the contemporary in all its unresolvable contradictions, point toward possible, unrealized futures. In thus thinking about the postcolonial present, art cinema was a distinct form of knowledge that contemplated historical time in unprecedented ways.

Good Films, Good Citizens Although Indian feature films were made as early as 1912–13, art cinema emerged as a postindependence phenomenon in the new nation-state.9 As a discursive formation, art cinema in India did not just denote a body of films but also included a constellation of objects, institutions, and practices such as filmmaking, film societies, writings about cinema in film society publications, trade and little magazines, film appreciation, theatrical and nontheatrical screenings, and the establishment of a host of state events and institutions for the improvement and promotion of films. Such institutions included, for example, the International Film Festival (1952), the National Film Archives (1964), the Federation of Film Societies in India (1959), the Film Finance Corporation (1960), and the Film Institute of India (1960, renamed as the Film and Television Institute of India in 1971). The founding of these institutions was coeval with the end of

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Introduction

British rule and the early decades of the sovereign Indian republic. Indian art cinema’s postcolonial character therefore has to be mapped in terms of its proximate but critical relationship to these institutions and to the new Indian nation state. The first academic department of film studies was established in Jadavpur University in 1993, thirteen years after Satyajit Ray proposed the idea during a speech at that institution.10 But long before there was any formal academic interest in the study of film, cinema became a matter of critical attention in India primarily through the efforts of film societies and a few ancillary institutions. Several Indian film scholars were once active film society members and served in editorial roles of journals published by these societies.11 It could be said that it was thanks to art cinema that film studies enjoyed a robust “public life” before it entered the “cloistered” space of the university in India.12 To be clear, art cinema was not an arm of the newly founded nation state. Even if some films received state funding and many represented India in film festivals abroad, the state and cinema (both art and commercial) remained distinct domains. Cinema was not recognized as an industry by the state. Nor was there any systematic subsidizing of the cinema through production, distribution, or the creation of new exhibition outlets. In this India was quite distinct for example, from postwar European nations as well as postcolonial nations like Egypt where under General Nasser cinema was nationalized, and state support for film culture, including the cine-club movement, continued even after the Naksa (setback) of 1967.13 Nor did India suffer the tragedy of failed or extremely authoritarian African states.14 The postcolonial Indian state was a democracy from the moment of national independence. It was part of the Non-Aligned Movement, whose most iconic moment was the 1955 Bandung conference to sustain a sense of Afro-Asian solidarity in a world divided by the Cold War. It was perhaps the idealistic milieu of the early postcolonial years rather than active state support that led proponents of art cinema to embrace the mission of the newly independent Indian state to cultivate an educated and enlightened citizenry. The Nehruvian project of building up a new India and Indian cineastes’ project of founding a new and enlightened cine culture were autonomous but connected, and resonated with each other. As the new nation state embarked on a path of modernization and development to ensure progress, some filmmakers nurtured similar ambitions on behalf of the nation, even if they just wanted to make “good films” to give India a place of pride in the arena of global cinematic arts. “Good cinema” in India arose as part of this desire, shared by large sections of the intelligentsia and the rulers of the nation, to make India “modern” not just through the trappings of modernization (railways, airplanes, dams, and capital-intensive projects), but also through citizens’ acquisition of the capacity to make individual judgments on various aspects of life, including

Introduction

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0.1 Filmikon, vol.  1, no.  1 (December  1976), Celluloid Film Society, Delhi University. Features future film studies scholar Ravi Vasudevan in an editorial role.

the ability to reflect back on their own times. Alongside the aspiration for international prestige, cineastes likewise embraced another goal: the creation of a responsible and discerning body of citizens capable of exercising and combining aesthetic and political judgments. A pedagogic commitment to forge a new cine culture that would help to create a body of enlightened aesthete citizens was a striking aspect of Indian art cinema’s postcolonial stance. Such a project was, of course, vulnerable to criticisms of elitism. Despite its proponents’

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Introduction

commitment to represent the people, friction persisted in India between those who saw cinematic culture and taste as an art to be refined and those who celebrated popular cinema as representing the “slum’s eye view of Indian politics.”15 It was as if in the beginning, around 1947 when India became independent, the elite’s sense of historical time had a unified character. Notwithstanding the ravages of famine, war, and the trauma of partition, history in the new nation had a unified telos for its elites: a narrative of transition to modernity. At the scale of the individual and the nation alike, they were committed to a shared, single story: a journey through historical time that included many difficulties and digressions but a journey whose points of departure and arrival were already known. For its elites, the nation existed as a pedagogical project. Its cinema was thus conceived in stride. Good films and good cinema were means of creating good and discerning citizen subjects. This book documents how the aspiration to make good films became dislodged from the aspiration to make good citizens. As that relation came undone in the 1960s and 1970s, the consensus over historical time that informed intellectual elites’ thinking about the postcolonial nation also changed. Instead of a progressive development, art cinema in India reconceptualized a sense of the present as pregnant with multiple contradictory possibilities, as if historical time had become fragmented, in some instances making only the present legible, and in others, many futures. Analyses of the present as heterotelic are at the heart of this book. The postcolonial present manifested in Indian art films was a constellation of competing and contradictory chronotopes, a new problem space from which no familiar futurity could emerge. It was a new regime of historicity, one indicative of new experiences of time experienced differently by people. As François Hartog notes, the experience of the “omnipotent and omnipresent present in which immediacy alone has value” depends on one’s position in society. It can be “experienced as emancipation or enclosure: ever greater speed and mobility or living from hand to mouth in a stagnating present.”16 As with the present, so too with futures. The new regime of historicity portended multiple, hitherto unscripted, and potentially threatening futures. Art cinema limned this postcolonial presentism in a gesture to move from the “uncanniness of what happens today” to “the discursivity of [historical] understanding.”17

Postcolonial Pedagogies It is important to understand that the pedagogical project that animated art cinema’s vision arose from a particular understanding of the citizen-subject. That idea is lost today, so it may be useful to explain it negatively—that is, by

Introduction

7

describing its difference from what citizenship has become in practice in contemporary India. Partha Chatterjee has recently drawn on M. Madhava Prasad’s model of the film-star-turned-politician to explain the authoritarian strain in contemporary Indian democracy. In Cine Politics (2014), Prasad describes how film-star politicians in several states of South India were “chosen”—through the democratic process of elections—to function as kings or royal personages. Notwithstanding the constitutional guarantee of universal adult franchise, the postcolonial citizen, by Prasad’s (and now Chatterjee’s) reckoning, had little or no “substantive” experience of “citizenship.”18 Bereft of a sense of sovereign power, the citizen-spectator cathected their desires for sovereignty onto the film-star politician. They related to the star-turned-politician “not as one sovereign to another, but as one element in a collective, whose identity depends upon the presence of the sovereign star at the apex.”19 The star-politician was an “exemplary entity” that filled the political and social void after the end of formal kingly rule. The electorate were “followers”—“relatively closed communities whose identity was anchored to the star.”20 Star politicians elected by the people emerge in Prasad and Chatterjee’s analysis as “kings of democracy!”21 The exclamation mark highlights the ironic anachronism of the two political models: monarchy and democracy. In Chatterjee’s configuration the “people” exists merely as a collectivity whose only effective power lay in the individual right to vote. The pedagogical project of art cinema in the early postcolonial years belonged to a period when elite aspirations for the fledgling democracy ran counter to the hierarchical and compensatory understanding of citizenship that many Indians seem to have settled for today. The concepts of the good citizen and good cinema came together in the idea of art cinema because the latter was seen as a powerful medium for developing discerning citizens through education, regardless of vast economic and political gaps between rulers and ruled. Art film’s normative ideal citizen was an individual, not a body or number in a collective whose subjectivity required a larger-than-life star leader to be realized. It was a notion of popular rather than royal sovereignty in which the people, “at least . . . in principle,” could be bearers of “the dignity of the prince.”22 Put differently, art films were postcolonial cultural articulations grappling with the “developmentalist figuration” of peoplehood whose contested colonial genealogy has recently become the focus of revisionist writings.23 Perhaps this explains the inability of art cinema to relate to, among others, the mythological genre— focusing on gods and kings—that had a robust popular and folkloric existence in India. Proponents of art cinema in India seemed to reject the idea of film as a mass cultural phenomenon even as they accepted its reality as a modern, industrial product. That this remained the vision of a dedicated minority, an activist elite, shows in art films’ struggles for big audiences. But it also explains the fraternal ties that art cinema followers felt with global antifascist

8

Introduction

movements, local struggles for people’s rights, and independent film movements.24 The capacity for dissent was central to this normative conception of citizenship and sovereignty; democracy and kingly power were incompatible. Box office success or failure could not undercut this normative vision. Despite the brevity of its life in the postindependence era, the pedagogical project and its demise allow us to see what happened to art cinema—at least in one case—as it moved east into the postcolony. The film society movement that flourished across the country is the preeminent site for the exploration of art cinema’s pedagogic drive. The history of Indian film societies reveals how explicitly their members pronounced on the connection between good cinema and good citizens. “At the dawn of independence, our national leaders had the vision and commitment to build up a nation of enlightened citizens capable of accessing and appreciating what was new in world culture, thereby enabling and encouraging them to contribute their might to the world in return”—thus wrote Adoor Gopalakrishnan (1941–), the filmmaker who cofounded the Chitralekha film society with Kulathoor Bhaskaran Nair in Trivandrum, Kerala.25 Gopalakrishnan, like many others, regarded film societies as the hinge between good cinema and good citizens that brought the best of “culture” to a new citizenry through screenings and discussions. “At a time when the cinemas of Europe and the East were inaccessible to the cinephiles of our subcontinent,” he wrote, “film societies provided us with the special privilege of watching, relishing, debating, and writing about the very best of world cinema. We became enriched in the process with the aesthetic experience of the most nascent of all art forms.”26 Gopalakrishnan and his colleagues at Chitralekha proposed a scheme for setting up art theaters across Kerala, “with a view to provide employment opportunities to the educated unemployed.”27 L. W. Baker, a British engineer domiciled in Kerala, drew up a blueprint for an elaborate complex—living quarters, sound studios, laboratories, administrative pavilions—for Chitralekha, most of which did not materialize.28 For many individuals who populate the history of art cinema in India—filmmakers, cinematographers, scriptwriters, engineers, technicians, architects, film club activists, song writers—the project of good cinema and that of creating an enlightened, sentient citizen body remained a live issue for much of the postcolonial period. In the first part of this book, I detail these discursive and institutional histories of art cinema in which the aim of good films was bound up with the project of making good citizens. In its second half, I focus on the three foundational figures of Indian art cinema, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak, bringing renewed attention to the trilogies that each made in the 1960s and 1970s. There are considerable overlaps in their careers: all were originally from the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh), each embarked on filmmaking at roughly the same time, remaining active throughout their lives

Introduction

9

in film society work, and all wrote extensively about cinema.29 Crucially for a history that attends to institutions, their work became the ground for debating good films in the country, and they have had considerable influence on future generations from the Indian new wave to contemporary cinema.30 But this book is neither a biographical study of these figures nor is it an exhaustive analysis of all their films (totaling close to a hundred).31 There is considerable material on these topics already. Rather, here I pursue the first book-length study of Indian art cinema and bring together its three foundational figures to show how art films—including those by Ray, Sen, and Ghatak—functioned as a “historiographical operation,” a mode of doing history.32 The historiographic project of the three directors was realized through different formal approaches. In an allegory of the transition of feudal subject into the modern citizen, Satyajit Ray adopted a realist mode in his Apu trilogy to express Apu’s evolution from a rural boy to urban man who broke away from his family’s hereditary profession of priesthood. Ritwik Ghatak did not shy away from using the metaphor of a “hammer” to instill a Brechtian sense of alienation in his audience to prevent them from immersing themselves in the dramatic action unfolding on screen. Combining Brechtian techniques with the style of a political pamphleteer, Mrinal Sen strived to have his audience imagine the postcolony in a global setting. Each of them wrote extensively, in both Bengali and in English, about their practice, their understanding of “good films,” problems with existing Indian films, and cinema more generally.33 Each sought to demonstrate that style and aesthetics were to be cultivated by both the filmmaker and the audience. Their screenplays were published in contemporary journals almost as manuals of the filmmakers’ craft.34 In a developing nation where international films were not readily available and where repeat viewing of films was very difficult, the cultivation of film taste required patience and enterprise. Isabel Hofmeyr’s idea of “patient reading” in her book Gandhi’s Printing Press (2013) may serve as a useful parallel to help us understand this particular pedagogical aspect of art cinema (even though, it should be noted, Gandhi abhorred the seductiveness of the image). According to Hofmeyr, M. K. Gandhi used the periodical Indian Opinion, which he edited from South Africa, to fashion reader sovereignty against the tempos of “industrial reading.” “Through patient reading,” wrote Hofmeyr, “resisting macadamization, readers could slow down the system, turning themselves into nodes of autonomy not through abstract ideals but through . . . small daily textual practices.”35 Slow reading also entailed instructions on looking; Gandhi enjoined readers not to “merely glance” at or “admire” images in the periodical.36 This model of reading as a “psychological adhesive that embedded values into the self and cultivated an expanded inner domain” was analogous to the way people spoke of good films.37 In the absence of regular theatrical screenings, Indian devotees of art cinema would spend hours to source, screen, transport, write

10

Introduction

about, and discuss films. Slowness and patience acquired particular charge in the context of the postcolonial, developing world marked by acute scarcity of resources. At first glance, such an ethic of slowness shares some similarities with Lutz Koepnick’s discussion of the long take, where cultivating attention was required to produce aesthetic relish and a capacity for wonder.38 But in the postcolonial setting, patience and slowness emerge as an ethic not because the plenitude of objects and pace of events pose challenges to staying focused. Rather, scarcity—of films, books, screens, theaters, and archives—made the road to expertise longer and uneven. Ghatak’s review of Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film—where he comments that “for persons in India today, detailed instances from his [Kracauer’s] book cannot be judged, as very few films that he mentions . . . can be seen here”39—give us some sense of the context of scarcity within which ordinary people and filmmakers set out to cultivate connoisseurship. One of the first and few art-house theaters, Nandan, was established in Calcutta as late as 1985, 38 years after independence.40 As a point of comparison, by 1950 there were 80 such theaters in America, a number that rose to 450 by 1963.41 Analyzing Indian art cinema as an aesthetic-political enterprise of slowness enriches the genealogies of slow cinemas documented by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge in the context of late capitalism.42 It highlights other histories for new concepts in films rooted in postcolonial scarcity and development in the global South. Art cinema’s pedagogical stance was not separate from a critical and negative attitude that its practitioners maintained toward films that were seen as simple-minded, with wish-fulfilling narratives. This charge was spelled out, for example, in a brochure published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Vijayawada Film Society: “Way back in 1973, a band of enthusiastic and starry-eyed young men was seized with the idea of forming [a] film society in Vijayawada. Disappointment with quality and content of the cinema around the poor taste of audiences in lapping up the unsavoury fare was the immediate cause. How to wean the cinegoer from the addiction to morphia-like commercial cinema was the problem. And also, how to promote the film culture and . . . to cultivate film appreciation towards good cinema among the audiences.” 43 It was as though Indian cinema was in danger from the threat of mainstream film industries and that film societies were its saviors. The inaugural issue of Filmikon, the journal published by students of Delhi University film society declared, “We at Celluloid feel it’s about time film societies took this entire business of cinema . . . more seriously. In the end the onus for propagating this medium will be on us. In India the odds are heavily stacked against any such attempt. The tradition of the Bombay/Madras films is strongly entrenched, and no . . . alternative to it has yet fully emerged. Nor is there any access to cinematic developments abroad.” 44 The high-flown rhetoric, heroic vanguardism, and

Introduction

11

youthful energy of these lines resonated with the discourse of film-related government documents in Nehruvian India. The 1951 report of the S. K. Patil committee, for example, underscored “the grave social responsibility” of Indian filmmakers in the current state of education in the country and the fact that “people can learn much quicker from film than from a book.” 45 Pedagogy was also needed to bring distinction to a medium that was regarded as lowly in comparison to the other arts. There were no national academies for film such as there were for classical music, fine arts, and literature—the Sangeet Natak Akademi (1952), Lalit Kala Akademi (1954), and the Sahitya Akademi (1954), respectively. Satyajit Ray said that he kept writing “about films from time to time,” out of the “zeal to spread film culture that brought our film club into being.” But it was also to combat the “harm” done by “critics . . . who keep peddling muddled notions about the art form” and to create the right norms for potential filmmakers.46 It was the Indian cineaste’s openness to learning that made it possible for a figure like Marie Seton, a British film society activist and author, to find a place in the annals of Indian art cinema in the wake of the country’s liberation from British rule. A faith in pedagogy, ultimately, was a belief in a particular liberal telos of progress: that education could be a means to lift both an art and a people from a state of underdevelopment. That was the sentiment that vivified much art cinema discourse. Ray testified to the success of this culture in Our Films Their Films. In the 1940s, he may have “possessed without much strain to my purse, all the English books on the art of the cinema, and shoved them all comfortably on to a single shelf of my book case.” By contrast, in the 1970s at the time of writing the book, his own “comprehensive catalog” of film books in English ran over three hundred pages, and of the number of film magazines “one has lost count.” He found that most bookshops in the city have film books that get “picked up well before they gather dust,” and tickets to watch foreign films at festivals are “swooped up in no time.” From one in 1947, there were by the 1970s well over a dozen film clubs in the city of Calcutta alone, all organized with their own bulletins and panels of critics. “Esoteric” film terms, such as “freeze,” were part of everyday speech for “any man of average education.” 47 A measure of the success of this mission to “learn and teach” good cinema practice was that its results far exceeded the lessons offered by educators and led to the making of films that could not have been anticipated. Some of these developments radically altered Indian film’s formal lexicon in the same way that one may say the English and French languages were transformed into global tongues in the hands of many authors from the erstwhile colonies so that they could “carry the weight” of an African or Indian experience. Indian cineastes who apprenticed themselves, figuratively speaking, to Sergei Eisenstein, Vittorio De Sica, or Jean Renoir went on to make films that were not simply Indian variants of Soviet montage or neorealism.

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Introduction

For a literary analogue of this dynamic, recall Aimé Césaire, writing in opposition to Sartre’s argument for French as an apposite vehicle for expressions of Africanness or blackness: “I try and have always wanted to bend French. That’s why I have had a strong affection for Mallarme, because he has shown me . . . that language at bottom is arbitrary. It is not a natural phenomenon . . . I recreate a language that is not French. If the French rediscover their language in mine, well, that’s their affair.” 48 Or, the poet Agha Shahid Ali (Shahid), whose poems transposed and adapted the Urdu lyric form, ghazal, into English, thus putting it in the province of “world literature,” but not before they enact an “uncanny encounter” between English and Urdu social imaginaries.49 In the process, notes Aamir Mufti, Shahid’s poems are immersed in the “question of nationalizing (that is partitioning) of society, culture, literature and social imaginaries in the subcontinent in the twentieth century” and offer us “resources for thinking about the . . . dialectic of indigenization and alienation.”50 Ghatak articulated a similar spirit when he pronounced: “we are not making experimental, pure, avant-garde, neo-realist films. We are making films. We have just commenced on that central project of art: seeking the truth. Our filmmaking is not yet ripe. After long years of backwardness we have now truly assessed and begun to master the practice.”51 These remarks underscore the desire to be liberated from what Keya Ganguly calls “the directional imperative” of film styles.52 The pressures of that imperative worked surreptitiously: that Ray watched ninety-eight films during his three-month stint at the D. J. Keymer office in London became lore, but not the critical account he wrote of these films in the Calcutta Film Society Bulletin upon his return. It was a radical instantiation of postcolonial pedagogy that a good film mobilized lessons learned from the West but did not compromise its historical difference to become communicable across cultures. Belatedness did not confer subordinate status upon the postcolonial.

Postcolonial Presents and Forgotten Futures Something fundamental to this landscape of the art film in India shifted in the course of the 1960s. The connection that art filmmakers had assumed in the 1950s and early 1960s between the making of good films and good citizens began to unravel as the promises of postcolonial development, justice, and prosperity for all receded into a distant horizon, giving rise to deep-seated civil unrest, disruptive rage, and political violence. Focusing on the trilogies by Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray, I argue that films starting from the 1960s were no longer tethered to the project of making good citizens. The three filmmakers self-consciously disarticulated their commitment to good filmmaking from the progressive narrative of the

Introduction

13

developmental nation state. Their insights into the making of a present that seems infinitely stretched out with no definite paths of transition in sight offer important, if implicit, theorizations of postcolonial temporality. Instead, the postcolonial present emerges in the works of the three leading figures of Indian art cinema as sites of many and different potentialities. Through an analysis of each trilogy, I illustrate how each director apprehends time as a formation of knot-like entanglements containing multiple possible futures. It seems that in giving up on the teleological project of shaping good citizens these filmmakers were able to move into an engrossing and all-encompassing engagement with the present. The chronotopes that comprised the present held many possibilities (as well as opacities) but none that suggested a preconceived or clearly conceivable future. In that sense, the present became heterotelic in these films, with multiple possible historical trajectories glimpsed in the same moment. Neither the narrative of progressive development of the nation nor that of a revolutionary overcoming of an unjust, postindependence social order could be embraced as hegemonic. Invoking historian Ranajit Guha, we could argue that the films in question rejected “the statism” that often underpins the understanding of Indian history as part of the Hegelian, universal “world-history” of progress and development. The latter “moves on a higher plane than that to which morality properly belongs. . . . The deeds of the great men who are individuals of world history . . . appear justified not only in their inner significance . . . but also in a secular sense. But from this latter point of view, no representations should be made against world-historical deeds and those who perform them by moral circles to which such individuals do not belong.”53 The political and social context of the 1960s signaled to filmmakers that world-history and the role of reason in its unfolding was complicit with colonialism and nationalism, and could no longer serve as an adequate explanatory grid for the evolving complexities of postcolonial life. The filmmaker, like the Annales historian Marc Bloch, “strolled” through the tumult of the postcolonial everyday with his “eyes open . . . to recuperate the historicality of what is humble and habitual.”54 In conceptualizing the present thus, Indian art films established cinema and history as a zone of conversation and convergence, figuring the “historicality” of the present.55 Because this book presents postcolonial art films as a mode of historical thinking, a “historiographical operation” as it were, it prompts a question about when and how interdisciplinary conversations occur between two fields. As Gilles Deleuze points out, “it is not when one discipline begins to reflect on another that they come into contact.” Rather, meaningful conversation happens when “one discipline realizes that another has already posed a similar problem, and so reaches out to the other to resolve this problem, but on its own terms and for its own needs.”56 That is to say, it is not only about how society is reflected

14

Introduction

in these films. Rather, that relationship constitutes a response through the figures and formalistic affordances specific to film. This is what the trilogies demonstrate so powerfully. The fragmented character of postcolonial time is on display in Ritwik Ghatak’s films, especially in the trilogy Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E-Flat, 1961), and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962, released in 1965). Ghatak was the filmmaker most disenchanted with the new postcolonial Indian state, calling it a “betrayal” for having been founded on the partition of human lives. Film became the site from which he could refute statist political decisions. The overall narrative arc of these films portrays the present as a time of complicated entanglements, connecting colonial pasts to postcolonial futures. The turmoil generated by national independence, which ended colonialism but also coincided with the partition, produced fissures in the lives of subjects who struggled to overcome the attenuating conditions generated by that traumatic event. Ghatak made them the subjects of his films. Despite the scars of partition, there are sequences in the films in which the present can still be experienced as a moment of plenitude. Ghatak’s deep attachment to the structure of Bengali poetry allows us to better understand these sequences’ swift and somewhat unexpected movement between different temporal registers. This play in temporalities is most prominent in the film’s songs. Songs disrupt the linear, developmental narrative of the film that is set in the progressive time of world-history. They collapse a palimpsest of past experiences and possible futures into a rich, singular experience both for the viewers of the film and the characters within the film. The songs mix the secular and religious, historical and mythic, fleeting and eternal, and produce a sense of multiple futures. They open up plural ways of being for the films’ characters that are too heterogenous to be accommodated within the story of postcolonial citizenship. Formally and thematically, the songs produce a challenge to the progressive and developmental ideas of modernity in which the rest of the film is situated. The profusion of songs—folk songs (bhatiali, baul, sari), mass political songs (ganasangeet), Tagore songs (rabindrasangeet), devotional songs (Uma-sangeet), classical raga-based songs, marching tunes, or even the track of “Patricia” from La Dolce Vita (Frederico Fellini, 1961)—is crucial to Ghatak’s apprehension of the postcolonial present as containing heterogenous temporalities that cannot be subordinated to the single and secular teleology of national development. The songs in his films are a flight, or at least a respite, from the relentless march forward of historical time emphasized in all prevailing versions of official nationalism. In his Calcutta trilogy—Interview (1971), Calcutta 71 (1972), and Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter, 1973)—Mrinal Sen historicized twentieth-century Indian history as a global history of hunger. At its center is the figure of the angry young

Introduction

15

man, a phenomenon usually associated with Amitabh Bachchan in popular Hindi films. Sen’s angry young man predated, and importantly differed from, his Hindi counterpart. Youth, rather than representing a stage of growth in the life of an individual, figures in Sen’s trilogy as a permanent condition for the possibility of political anger. Encapsulated in the anachronism of a “twentyyear-old” who has been walking for a “thousand years,” Sen’s youth bears witness to the tumultuous decades of the century that are collapsed into the metaphor of a famine: of both food and of thought. Famine in Sen’s oeuvre is not an event that occurred in 1943—the tragic and infamous wartime famine in colonial Bengal—but a phenomenon that encompasses the continuum of the twentieth century. The present has arisen out of this long-lasting famine. Like Ray and Ghatak, Sen bore the ideological burden of the Indian left. In his trilogy, Calcutta is a city that has to be seen in the context of the international history of the Left. But Sen’s history veers from prevailing Indian leftist historical accounts. Anger in the trilogy makes the present a time of explosive energies and eventually of empathetic identification with groups that the Indian left often marked out as class enemies and anarchists. Sen’s diagnosis of the present aligns best with what, following legal and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, we describe as “intersectionality.”57 The trilogy calls attention to the present as a moment of inequality and marginalization that is experienced not just along doctrinaire class lines, but intersectionally, in varied ways, also factoring in questions of gender, intergenerational differences, and so on. This gestures toward a politics that can contain groups that would be otherwise dismissed as “class enemies.” The anger produced by such an experience is felt rather than diagnosed. Instead of a systematic guide to prognosticating and resolving anger, Sen simply postulates it as the affective structure of the everyday. Only empathetic identification—within the family or sometimes even among strangers—can produce moments of relief. Through his use of posters, graffiti, newspaper clippings, found and documentary footage, and an episodic narrative structure, Sen’s trilogy vividly memorializes a moment of democratic crisis in Indian history. His film style renders that moment as elastic, a chronotopic dilation at once situated in its instant but also stretching out geographically to other tumultuous contexts and into many earlier times. The lack of a decipherable future for the protagonists in Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy, which coincided with Sen’s, concludes my discussion of Indian art films and the postcolonial condition. The scholarly and critical literature on Ray is polarized, even though he is inarguably India’s best-known filmmaker and someone who brought Indian art films to the notice of international and national audiences with the success of the Apu trilogy. The debate about Ray centers on his political radicalism, or the lack of such radicalism. In a set of influential essays in the Journal of Arts and Ideas, Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha read Ray’s realist style in the Apu trilogy and

16

Introduction

early films as the aesthetic affirmation of Nehruvian development, a “subterfuge” that shielded the trauma and displacement of famine and partition that preceded the foundation of the Indian nation-state.58 These positions have since been challenged through the demonstration that Ray’s early work “is not a seamless, organic narration of origins, as if the nation can aesthetically inscribe an uninterrupted narrative of itself.”59 I argue that Ray’s oeuvre embodies the shift in art cinema that this book charts: the separation of the projects of making good citizens from making good films. His early work may be seen as an unfolding of what I call the long present in Bengali history. The central concern of this long present, which commenced in the nineteenth century, was the question of the transition to modernity and Bengal’s imbrication in world-history. Transition is the main trope in the narratives of migration, development, autonomy, modern conjugality, and the loss and tension that accompany such movements in Ray’s early works. Giuliana Bruno registers the desire for modernity in a brief but evocative discussion of Ray’s Pather Panchali: “A traveling exhibitor arrives in the village where Apu’s family lives. With the viewing box, he brings the world of the city to this rural site, attracting to the village square crowds of children who are eager to see views of the great Indian cities of Bombay and Delhi. The same youngsters who long for the “new world” of mondo nuovo also love trains and like to watch them crossing the landscape. Views of modernity shape the world of Apu. . . . Imaged as a drive to travel, to explore space and city views, modernity is represented as moving image.”60 Ray’s early films register history as a movement between feudal pasts and modern futures. Ray’s city trilogy, by contrast, is devoid of such transitions. It portrays a stalled temporality, not unlike the “present tenseness” that Jennifer Fay identifies in American film noir, a refusal or inability to think into the future.61 In thinking thus about the present, Ray relinquishes the ground he once shared with many of his viewers. This explains why so many critics accounted for Ray’s refusal to chart possible paths into the future by interpreting it as his “inertia towards a social prognosis,” or as a lack of revolutionary commitment to social transformation.62 I do not see Ray in terms of such contemporary critiques. Instead, I analyze the city trilogy as Ray’s commentary on the postcolonial present caught in a vortex. Unable to suggest any obvious paths for significant movement beyond the vortex itself, Ray can only describe it. His style shifted accordingly: from being a historian working in the medium of cinema, Ray moved into an ethnographic mode that describes a stalled and fragmented present. In the former mode, Ray demonstrated assurance in his reconstruction of a past that showed a way forward into the future. The wellknown train-spotting scene in Pather Panchali, or the sequence evocatively discussed by Bruno from the same film, brilliantly encapsulates rural India’s encounter with modernization and the birth of the modern subject. In the city

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trilogy, by contrast, the present only confounds. It is as though Ray was more at ease with the notion of the historian’s period than with the anthropologist’s present. The cinematic rendering of such confusion was not, however, a flight from politics. It bespeaks humility: an epistemological and ethical position aware of its own limitations. Put differently, once the teleological certainty underlying the ideology of development is upended, another kind of aesthetic potential opened up that many contemporaries misrecognized as apolitical. Ray’s Calcutta trilogy focuses on the cinematic means he adopted to express this complex stance on the postcolonial present. But why did it matter to so many critical viewers that films be the bearers of revolutionary transformation? Why would a statement Ray made in 1972 that his “political films,” referring to the city films, did not resemble those of Glauber Rocha or Jean-Luc Godard, be regarded as a lack of conviction and commitment? Under what circumstances and to what persuasions would his belief “in the individual and in personal concepts [rather] than in a broad ideology” be seen as problematic?63 These questions go to the heart of the split in art films’ positioning in the postcolony.

Art Cinema and Postcolonial History Having lost faith in the transition to modernity promised by Nehruvian development, many within the Indian intelligentsia argued that such a modern project was flawed to begin with due to its association with colonialism. By the early 1970s, ideas of “total revolution” or of a “passive revolution” of the Gramscian kind were being voiced. The relevance of art films depended on the pedagogic task of preparing citizens for such politics. This, at any rate, was the charge. But just as much, there seemed no consensus, either within the ranks of filmmakers or among viewers and critics on how best to go about such a task. Ghatak, Sen, and Ray stand out for registering in no uncertain terms that the postcolonial consensus was in disarray, and with it art cinema’s previous certainty about its pedagogic function. The postcolonial present emerges in the trilogies as a “problem-space” where, in David Scott’s astute twenty-first century formulation, “the old paths between questions and answers do not necessarily disappear; their cognitive connections may remain visible and intelligible as the norm or the convention, but the paths go nowhere because the stakes involved in walking them have dissolved.”64 Film, I submit, anticipated the turn that would occur in postcolonial history and theory decades later. I focus on these films because of their apprehension of the postcolonial present as irreducibly not one. Indian historians of the Subaltern Studies school, or those writing about women and caste, and postcolonial scholars more

18

Introduction

generally, came to similar conclusions years later.65 The prevailing wisdom in professional historiography in the 1950s, and lasting well into the 1980s, was that the processes of “transition,” which began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the rise of Indian nationalism, were “grievously incomplete.” India neither succeeded in building a Gandhian polity of Ram Rajya (the mythical just reign of Lord Ram, Gandhi’s metaphor for the small village republic), nor was there a fully fledged leftist social revolution. The postindependence promise of capitalist development also remained largely unfulfilled. Indian historians from the 1960s onward set themselves the task of understanding the causes for these incomplete transitions. In Ranajit Guha’s programmatic statement for Subaltern Studies, “It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come into its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it to a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is a ‘new democracy’ . . . which constitutes the central problematic” of modern Indian history.66 It was only from the early 1990s that Guha and others began to move away from the transition narratives that anchored their earlier works. But the filmmakers had long anticipated historians. This book is my endeavor as a historian to analyze the historiographical operation that made it possible for these filmmakers to theorize thus about India’s postcolonial condition, and to perceive in the medium of cinema the problem that would concern Indian historians for several decades. Although each of my filmmakers apprehended the history of the present in a unique way, the trilogies were a break from Indian historiography’s depiction of the postcolonial present as representing an incomplete, but yet to be fulfilled, transition to modernity. To that degree these films completely rejected the teleology of world-history. Instead, they sought to understand the present as a culmination of a multiplicity of pasts and paths, and as constituted by many nonsynchronous histories none of which can be relegated to anachronism. For them, filmmaking by the 1960s had become an ethico-historical task of adhering as faithfully as possible to the multiple and contradictory futures the postcolonial present was pregnant with. Some of these characteristics overlap with the ethical and political orientation of Latin American third cinema, itself a diverse body of films, “film-acts,” and manifestos.67 But there are important differences too, not least in third cinema’s radical practice of letting a film be open and contingent to its exhibition context (even if poor exhibition quality in India sometimes inadvertently caused such repudiation). Ray, Ghatak, and Sen would not have described their films, as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino did their four-hour long La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), as “an act, before being a film: an act of liberation.”68

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The category “third cinema” was much debated within the context of global art cinema. Animated by the spirit of decolonization as well as the inspiration of a preceding generation of “activist-theorists,” Ho Chi Minh, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, third cinema was not restricted to the Third World. “Even in the original conception of the idea,” Solanas and Getino illustrated it with examples from the First World, “Newsreel, a US New Left film group, the cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the films made by the Etats Généraux du Cinema Français, . . . those of the British and Japanese student movements . . . the experiments of Chris Marker in France.”69 In this, it was “postcolonial.” Such descriptions resemble Leela Gandhi’s characterization of postcolonial thinking as an “assemblage or jugaad”: an intersectional combination of western self-critique expressed in minor, avant-garde, anti-imperial movements, anti-colonial liberation, and planetarity.70 Distinct from globalization, the awareness of the planet is an event that marks significant scholarship in the humanities today. In its critique of modernization and development narratives, of the entanglement of human and nonhuman entities, the legacy of Indian art cinema gains renewed salience in this moment that several scholars christen as the planetary. “Underdevelopment,” as Akhil Gupta observed, “becomes a form of identity in the postcolonial world. . . . Not merely a structural location in the global community of nations.” As a complex articulation of poverty and scarcity that was transformed into an enabling condition for creativity, Indian art cinema was a visual-conceptual expression of the postcolonial condition. Looking back on it today, its ethical foundations would seem to signal filiation with contemporary articulations of planetarity rather than with globalization.71 At its core was the idea of a good film and how that concept was transformed. It is only fitting to close this discussion with an illustration—through the work of Ghatak—of a filmic rendering of the idea of commitment (to good film, in this case) and how complex the various issues involved in this project could be. Let us recall a scene from the end of Ghatak’s Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Tale, 1974) where he exemplifies the idea of commitment by moving between literature and cinema. In the throes of death from a bullet wound, Neelkantha Bagchi—played by Ghatak himself—speaks to his wife, Durga, and recalls the final lines of a short story by Bengali socialist author Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–1956). In it, Madan, an impoverished village weaver, has refused to work his loom with the thread given to him by the moneylender. That would have been a betrayal of all weavers in the village. But sitting idle would have only made him more rheumatic. “So I ran the empty loom all night long. I have to do something!” There are multiple mediations at work here in Jukti, Ghatak’s last film. Bandyopadhyay’s story, “Shilpi” (Artist, 1946), which Ghatak’s character (Neelkantha) cites, is set in the context of the famine and wartime shortages that plagued the Bengal countryside in the 1940s, causing thousands of deaths and

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Introduction

massive flight from the villages to Calcutta. Rapacious moneylenders, landlords, and big tradespeople lured by profits in a colonial, wartime economy squeezed landless peasants and small artisans out of jobs and livelihoods. Madan, a weaver by caste, is renowned for his skill and artistry. But he has been jobless for months. When his pregnant wife’s condition worsens, he finally asks the moneylender for a small loan of thread and money. But the thread he receives is of appalling quality, fit only for weaving thin gamchas (lightweight bath towels), not beautiful benarasi saris. All night long the neighbors hear the frenetic drone of Madan’s loom. They rush to his hut at daybreak, curious to see the results of his labors. Pointing them to his empty loom, Madan speaks the lines that Neelkantha remembers: “I have to do something!” Why does Neelkantha, gasping, recall these lines? Contrary to appearances, running the empty loom is a form of productive activity: the weaver’s production of himself. This is reminiscent of what Hannah Arendt wrote about action, “the political activity par excellence.”72 Madan refuses to give in to the pain of hunger, not his alone, but also that of his wife and children. “Natality” in the sense of “initiative, an element of action,” and not “mortality,” animates him.73 Instead of resting his fatigued body and mind after the day’s ordeals, he runs his loom relentlessly through the night. It is an aberrant gesture of defiance, loaded with anger against the dominant classes, as if living out the Arendtian dictum of political activity. The aberrance lies not least in the weaver’s pride in the performance of skill that results in no physical object, no commodity. Invoking Bandyopadhyay’s story, Neelkantha (and Ghatak) places himself in a lineage of polemical artists, voicing a paean to the existential importance of his own craft. The complexity of this citational scene deepens when we remember that the name Neelkantha, meaning “the blue throated one,” refers to the Hindu god Shiva who drank halahala, a poison that arose from the churning of the oceans.74 Shiva ingests the venom to preserve the cosmos. Halahala is so potent, though, that he cannot let it reach his stomach, which is why his neck turns blue. Ghatak’s dying Neelkantha has taken a bullet meant for the Naxalite (Maoist) rebels with whom he had been engaged in argument all night long. Just as argument, even inconclusive debate, was the vocation of the intellectual, so too was making “good films” the filmmaker’s, until his last breath. Besides, however productive those activities might be, they are free from any compulsion to generate value for the market or edification for a citizen. Signifying value of a different kind, the weaver, the writer, the intellectual, the god, and the filmmaker, belong in one continuum. By conjoining these multiple strands— the Neelkantha/Shiva myth, the memory of the progressive Bengali writer’s heroic weaver, and the arguments made by the itinerant protagonist engineer/ intellectual—Ghatak’s last work invites us to understand cinema as a particular form of knowledge about the postcolonial condition. A “good film” registers

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the complexity of that condition and provides ways for thinking about how best to live in that postcolonial world.

The Plan of the Book As should be clear by now, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers both a history of cinema and an account of films as a history of the present. In their unique and intense engagement with the postcolonial condition, the films under discussion are also histories of unrealized futures. Questions of cinematic representation play an important role in this conceptual and historical endeavor. Representation, however, is at the service of, and therefore secondary to, a historical understanding of the contemporary condition. Put differently, art films are intellectual histories crafted through a new medium that drew on the rich history of global art cinema and transposed that inheritance into a form of knowledge and mode of intellection appropriate for postcolonial thought. I have organized the book in two parts, each comprising three chapters, to reflect this commitment to the history of art cinema and to the art film as history. I begin with the arrival of the category of art cinema to India, a history in which the newly formed state as well as many individuals, Indian and foreign, had a part. Focusing on Marie Seton (a British film society activist and writer who visited India many times), government reports, and unofficial reflections on the state of film in the country, I demonstrate the early postcolonial emergence of film appreciation and Indian art cinema. The second chapter on the Indian new wave provides a conceptual history of newness as the category “new cinema” and “new wave” was claimed from 1969 onward for a body of films that sought to distinguish themselves from the art cinema of the 1950s. The fierce polemics that ensued and the lack of consensus among parties in the debates dramatize Indian art cinema as a site of multiple anxieties and stakes as it matured in the postcolony. Newness, I argue, was among other things about a capacity to generate the experience of an aesthetic as a rupture in habit and routine. Therein lay its political edge. The third chapter on the film society movement concludes this section. Film societies emerge in this account as embodiments of the physical and affective labor of building a movement around films with the ultimate goal of strengthening Indian democracy. The voluminous archive of publications preserved through the dedication of individuals committed to the cause of art cinema bears witness to the highly charged expectations projected onto film in postcolonial India. Film society journals, program notes, and reminiscences are an incomparable resource for understanding film’s relationship with contemporary history and the imaginations of the future in the world’s largest democracy.

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The second part of the book focuses on the three trilogies by Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray during the 1960s and 1970s. Ray was the most decorated figure of the trio, Ghatak the most tragic. But each was widely influential within Indian film circles through their writings, film society work, and, of course, filmmaking. Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who began their careers as new wave filmmakers, acknowledge Ray’s influence on their craft. Ghatak served briefly as the vice principal at the Film Institute of India in Pune. His tenure profoundly influenced avant-garde filmmakers of the Indian new wave like Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, and John Abraham. Sen was the only one in the group who made films in multiple Indian languages— Bengali, Hindi, Oriya, and Telugu—and is credited as a pioneer of the Indian new cinema even though his filmmaking career also began in the 1950s like the other two. While critical literature often pits these figures against each other as if they were counterpoints, I see them as each other’s necessary counterparts.75 The three men engaged polemically with each other in print; they also dedicated essays and books to one another. In the ultimate analysis, they were united by their commitment to the cause of good films as a way to engage the postcolonial present and imagine different futures. Their trilogies led to fierce debates (especially within the ranks of film societies but also without) about film’s place in thinking about radical social change. Sen, Ghatak, and Ray thus appear in this book as historians working through a new medium, film. Their insights into the evolving uncertainties of the postcolonial condition are my primary interest. Those insights have kept this body of films alive. The various strategies of the films discussed here—deployed to document the manifold contradictions at the heart of the present they inhabited and critiqued without succumbing to the lures of any grand historical resolution—have not lost their relevance. They speak to our own uncertain times when various crises of planetary proportions leave us disoriented and unmoored from any emancipatory visions of human futures. Art cinema itself has become a cinematic practice of the past. But these films by Ray, Sen, and Ghatak have much to say to us about how one might devise strategies for narrating times that the writer Amitav Ghosh has described as “the great derangement.”

CHAPTER 1

ART CINEMA The Indian Career of a Global Category

T

he absence of a sustained analysis of the category “art cinema” is sometimes seen as a curious gap in an otherwise rich and expanding body of scholarship on Indian films. Film scholar Ravi Vasudevan drew attention to this gap in 2011 when he observed that, in recent years, “the ground of public and film-critical attention has shifted, and four areas of Indian cinema have become visible”—popular formats, diaspora productions, international collaborations, and documentary films. “The Indian art film and author cinema,” he added, “continues to be showcased at home and abroad, but has become somewhat marginal both to public discussion and scholarly engagement.”1 Seldom analyzed, the category “art cinema” circulates, however, in writings of commentators in the mainstream media, film critics, state officials, and film studies specialists who write as if it refers to a definite and distinct set of objects called “art films.” In such usage, “art cinema” presumes some standard binary distinctions between high and popular culture; between an assumed preference for pulp and melodrama among the masses and elite bourgeois tastes; and between films clustered under the rubrics of Bollywood, Kollywood, or Tollywood and those that defy such labels.2 Critics also identify the beginnings of art cinema with the project of modernization espoused and initiated by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In this relationship that is supposed to have existed between cinema and the state in the postindependence years, Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) often serves as the “pertinent first reference” for many influential film theorists.3 Arguing that his early films echoed the Nehruvian ideology of modernization, they contend that “the

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T H E H I S TORY OF A RT   C I N E M A

realist narration Ray adopted in the phase of national reconstruction had much that was elitist in affiliation.”4 The overwhelming focus on Ray has hurled into anonymity his less successful confreres, some of whose filmic endeavors preceded Ray’s debut film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955); it has made critics overlook the explicit discussions that spurred thinking about a new kind of cinema for India before Ray appeared on the film scene. But the term is ubiquitous in presentday film studies though the history of the expression and its referent remains unexamined. Thus Vasudevan’s observation on the decline of scholarly discussion on the “Indian art-film” underlined a change within the wider field of Indian cinema studies, but his use of the category art film begs the question: What is or was the Indian art film? Answering the question turns out to be more challenging than it seems at first sight. The putative distinction between “art” and “commercial” cinema has become part of cinematic common sense in India, but it is not at all clear as to when and by what processes such a nomenclature came into circulation and gained general acceptance in the country. In seeking to answer this question historically, my aim, however, is not simply to track the career of the term in India. Alongside, I want to register, at a more general level, the aspirational nature of the category “art cinema.” It was an aspiration shared worldwide at different points in time by filmmakers and theorists who wanted to accord to cinema the status of an art, alongside painting, sculpture, literature, and certain performing arts.5 Rather than referencing a specific or fixed set of styles or filmic devices, “art cinema,” I will argue, found a home in India as something that pointed to this desire to see films express a distinction between high and low art.6 The apparent stability of the category of art cinema was the result of a conjuncture of elitist and pedagogical projects around “good” cinema. The latter was akin to, though not identical with, the new Indian nation-state’s project of forging a national cinema in an unmanageably diverse and multilingual country. What rendered the category appealing, as well as national and cosmopolitan at the same time, was the promise that cinema held out, due to its relationship to sound (particularly nonlinguistic sound) and image, of being able to get around the Tower of Babel that was the heterogeneity of Indian language worlds.7 Such a desire, visibly in play in early writings on cinema in India, resonated with the activism of Marie Seton (1910–1985), an English film society activist, critic, biographer, and filmmaker who visited the country in the 1950s. Seton worked with missionary zeal to establish “art cinema” as a universal idiom and to inculcate the practice of “film appreciation” that would help crystallize that ideal into practice. These different tendencies came together to give the category art cinema a provenance in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but not before the diversity of Indian filmic practices had rendered the ascribed universality of the category impossible to achieve.

Art Cinema 27

The Global, the Local, and the Film Enquiry Committee of 1951 The 1951 report of the Indian government’s Film Enquiry Committee provides a starting point for our analysis. The committee was set up under the aegis of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting within two years of the formal declaration of independence and chaired by freedom fighter, congressman, and three-time mayor of Bombay S. K. Patil (1898–1981).8 Ashish Rajadhyaksha has drawn attention to the report as the originary moment when a discourse of art cinema, identified as “good” cinema, began in India. In his reading, the Patil committee report inaugurated “two specific attitudes to film.”9 The first of these had to do with the supposedly deleterious effects of “commercial” cinema on audience taste “because of the kind of capital that flowed into it.”10 Secondly, argued Rajadhyaksha, the report made a distinction between this potentially harmful version of cinema and a “serious, good, parallel, art cinema” that “inevitably claimed . . . [a] realist intent.”11 The committee was the second of its kind in Indian history, the first one having been set up in 1927–28 (R, 9). The overwhelming focus of the previous inquiry was on censorship in the era of silent films.12 Much had changed in the intervening decades. The creation of a sovereign Indian state made it a matter of some urgency for the government that “a thorough enquiry” be conducted to assess the state of the film industry and to suggest means by which to put cinema “on a sound footing and . . . developed as a medium of education and healthy entertainment” (R, 1). The power of the medium served as further justification for constituting a committee a mere two years after the independence of the country. As the report noted, in India in 1951 “the film ha[d] a coverage of about 16 lakhs [1.6 million] of persons per day, and it [was] therefore, comparable in its influence to the daily press” (R, 39). The advent of talkies from 1931 boosted the Indian film industry but it received little support from the colonial state. However, with the introduction of dialogue and music, as the 1951 report noted, “producers in countries where English was not spoken, were secure from United States competition for quite some time,” and while “U.S. producers started making versions of their productions in major European languages,” they did not undertake similar ventures in India (R, 11).13 This inadvertent protection afforded by the use of language gave a fillip to Indian cinema. In addition, the use of vernacular languages in Indian films brought the medium closer to the general population, most of whom at this time were nonliterate (R, 11). Moreover, “the cinema habit” as the report called it, spread ever more during the war years as a means of both “relieving war-time tension” and for “stimulating war propaganda” (R, 12). Thus from 400 in 1931 (the year of the first Indian sound film), the number of permanent cinemas rose to 1265 in 1939 and further to 2090 in 1945 (R, 12). This was the context in which we have to place the new

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Indian state’s drive to produce a film-literate and informed audience in the postindependence milieu. The loss of markets and personnel that resulted from the partition of 1947 left film production in Bengal and Bombay in considerable disarray, the former more deeply than the latter. Nonetheless the business of cinema continued to draw large numbers of people as actors, exhibitors, distributors, and producers. In the absence of proper regulations, however, the film industries in different parts of the country presented “a picture of maladjustment” (R, 16).14 Cinema, according to the report, was profitable only for a handful of producers. In the committee’s view, the lure of “quick and substantial returns” kept up a steady stream of “new entrepreneurs who are prepared to gamble for high stakes, often at the cost of both the taste of the public and the prosperity of the industry” (R, 16). The cinema was different from the radio and the press; it was capable, said the committee, of “arousing vivid psychological reactions in each individual separately, in a darkened room where hundreds are assembled.” While inducing a feeling of “mass participation,” it afforded the individual viewer the freedom “to savour the fine points according to his own interpretation and to react in his own close personal way” (R, 39). The committee, speaking both for and to the government, felt concerned that the general public were drawn to movies that “not only discredit their intelligence but also enhance their reputation for credulity and submission to make[-]believe” (R, 16). Hence, out of a stated sense of “public duty,” the committee urged the government to address the “apathy” that the general public showed “to the quality of the fare served to them and the conditions in which it is served” (R, 16). “The approach of the general public,” the committee noted, on the basis of their interviews, had been, “on the whole, far from being comprehensive or well-instructed” (R, 7). Witnesses who appeared before them “were generally critical of the conditions in cinemas but unrepentant of their cinema-going habits” (R, 7). The report cannot be divorced from the global context of the end of World War II and the decolonization of the 1940s and 1950s. The very prose of the report suggests some influence of British film criticism of this period. S. K. Patil “recalled the valuable assistance rendered by the British Film Institute to him and other members of [his] committee when they . . . visited England during the course of their inquiry.”15 Earlier, Patil had spent some time as a student of journalism at the University College, London, when he attended lectures by Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. At LSE, he crossed paths with V. K. Krishna Menon (1896–1974), a close aide of Jawaharlal Nehru, who would eventually form a film society for the India League in London.16 Patil also traveled to Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, ending up in Paris where he stayed with D. G. Tendulkar (1909–1971) who together with Menon was the chief conduit for bringing to India the British film critic and biographer Marie

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Seton.17 At a reception organized to welcome Seton on November 10, 1955, upon her arrival in India at the Famous Cine Laboratories and Studios, Mahalaxmi (in Bombay), Patil acknowledged the British Film Institute as a “model” for undertaking research and disseminating information about film to the public. Generally speaking, British policies continued to exercise sway on the official Indian imagination of the development of cinema in the early postcolonial decades. The British film curator and archivist Ernst Lindgren’s role in the formation of the National Film Archives in Pune is another example of this.18 Like their counterparts in France, Italy, and Germany, British film critics were engaged from the early 1940s in self-consciously constituting a new object—the “quality film”—and in informing and educating a public that knew little about it. John Ellis’s 1978 essay “Art, Culture and Quality” cites a 1947 article from Sight and Sound that praised Roger Manvell (1909–1987) for his efforts at publishing film-related books “for the mass of the public whose opinion, totaled, should be the criterion for good taste.”19 The resemblance between the general terms in which film as an artifact was described in the 1951 Indian report and the literature cited by Ellis is hard to ignore. Anthony Asquith, writing in the Penguin Film Review, described cinema “as a medium of artistic expression and as a means of public information and education” that Richard Winnington observed in the News Chronicle could at once “entertain, inform, secure attention, touch emotions” (quoted in ACQ, 21). British film critics argued that films were a “new art” that was “not only a new form of entertainment but a novel instrument for influencing the taste, mode of life and emotions of virtually unlimited numbers. . . . A new sense through which to experience the visible world” (quoted in ACQ, 21). The opinion is echoed in the observation of the Indian report that movement in cinema produced “a vividness, an element of life and sensation, and an essentially human interest which transform it into a visible personal experience. In this lies the power and danger of the film from the public or social point of view” (R, 39). British discussions about the “quality film” in the 1940s revolved around a particular brand of humanism championed by the Labor government in power. It was a humanism that sought “a progressive elevation of the hitherto deprived classes to the heights of bourgeois culture: an attitude neatly encapsulated in Ellen Wilkinson’s desire as minister for education to create “a Third programme nation” (ACQ, 16–17). Similar sentiments animated parts of the Indian report that tried to walk a fine line between a liberal zeal to educate audiences in proper film taste and a belief that “people” had an innate inclination for appreciating the “finer parts of a film” that could come into play even without such education. In this they took issue with producers who suggested that it was “necessary . . . to plan and make the film in such a way that it appeals to a large number of people.” Indian producers, the report stated, felt that films, “however distasteful they might appear to those who have had the advantage

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of a better educational and cultural background,” had to pander to those “who crowd the cheaper seats in the cinemas, and whom one might call the culturally underprivileged.” However, the authors of the report disagreed: “the assumption that people who have to work with their hands or who have not had the benefit of high school education are inherently coarse in their tastes is, in our opinion an unjustified slander on the bulk of the population” (R, 48). Such views, “sedulously fostered by the film industry,” were, the report said, “a mere excuse for the poverty of art and talent in the industry and an apology for the mediocrity which abounds in it. For those who aim only to exploit the cinema-going public, entertainment is synonymous with what is cheap and will pander to the lower taste of the audience” (R, 42). Continuing in this vein, the report further added, “while during the show this [uneducated] part of the audience may enjoy the cheaper type of entertainment, they have their own opinions about the quality or lack of it in the fare that is offered. The appeal of the finer parts of a film is not altogether lost on them and their powers of discrimination are by no means blunt or stunted” (R, 48). Dismissing as too “narrow” the views held by many producers that films could either be “entertainment” or “art,” the committee noted “films, whether depicting or escaping from the realities of life, are not and cannot be its ‘bloodless substitutes.’ ” At once a means of “communication, . . . an interpretation of life through art, . . . a vehicle of artistic expression, . . . the productive effort of co-operation and collaboration, . . . and exploiting one of the very effective and subtle formative influences, namely entertainment,” cinema had a huge “cultural and sociological” import that could not be ignored by the state (R, 46). This preference for a balance between “art” and “entertainment” was not original to the Indian committee. The argument that the main task of a film (in the words of Winnington) “is to tell a story entertainingly” had also been made in Britain (ACQ, 22). In discussions of “quality” films such as Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), versus those like Men of Two Worlds (Thorold Dickinson, 1946), Winnington described the latter film as a “well meaning bore,” and Manvell highlighted yet another crucial issue—namely, the ability of a domestic product to resonate with foreign audiences. Resorting to notions of humanism, Manvell wrote that “the increase of humanity in our films is . . . difficult to define. . . . The success of Brief Encounter abroad was due to the warmth of feeling in the conception of character.” Manvell criticized “even . . . good” British films for failing to attract foreign audiences as they conveyed “only the surface of human life and not its depths” (ACQ, 22–23). So, too, did the Indian report define the ideal qualities of a good film: “A film enlivens while it entertains, it teaches while it amuses, and it creates a world of impressions and ideas in which humanity at times seeks refuge from frustration, discontent and the hard realities of existence” (R, 42). Escapism was not condemned out of hand. Rather, such “escape” was not “reprehensible provided the place

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and manner in which escape is sought is correctly chosen” (R, 42). These pedagogical views in turn entailed certain ideas about “realism.” The real, argued Ellis, functioned in the British context of the late 1940s and 1950s as a “moral imperative.” Realistic films avoided “misrepresentation of place and character for the sake of convention or the susceptibilities of romance” (ACQ, 28). Films that aspired to represent the real could be “sordid, harsh, salty, alive. . . . [It is] in the nature of things [that they] impart the documentary feel we crave for and miss in other films with ostensibly worthier objects” (ACQ, 28–29). The emphasis on realism and humanism was indicative of global discussions in cinema in the postwar world. André Bazin was a key influence on these discussions. He serves as an example of a tendency among critics in the postimperial world to construct canons of good cinema.20 There is considerable debate among film historians about the precise timing and extent of Bazin’s influence in the Anglophone world.21 It suffices to note that writings about and by him, some of them even in a critical vein, appeared in British journals such as Sight and Sound, Movie, and Oxford Opinion from 1958 onward.22 Dudley Andrew, Antoine de Baecque, and Philip Watts have variously drawn attention to the ways in which Bazin was actively elevating certain filmmakers, notably Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, Robert Flaherty, and Jean Renoir into a pantheon. “Just after the war,” writes Andrew, “Bazin felt no discomfort in accusing certain standard filmmakers of a certain haughtiness in their approach to film, while he himself was actively building a contemporary mythology around the figures of Roberto Rossellini and Orson Welles.”23 In the United States, too, there existed a group of film critics who engaged the idea of good cinema, but from a different point of view. They included personalities like Otis Fergusson, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, and James Agee, christened as the “Rhapsodes” by David Bordwell.24 Different from Bazin or Marie Seton in Britain, these men recognized film as a popular art, considered it primarily a visual medium communicating through movement, and rejected the artiness associated with Russian and avant-garde film. Circumventing questions about film as mass culture, these critics presented their readers with close readings drawn from methods in literary studies, musicology, and art history to present new interpretations of figures as varied as Charlie Chaplin, John Huston, and Maya Deren. The emergence of major British reviewers, such as James Agate and C. A. Lejeune, who had gathered their film journalism into books, or of American critics like Mark Van Doren and John Mason Brown from the 1940s, epitomized an era when cinema had finally emerged as an object worthy of energetic debate and discussion.25 The result of these diverse energies produced a vibrant atmosphere in many parts of the world in discussions about film as an art. India was understandably more influenced by British developments than by discussions in other places, but there were interesting differences, too, with the

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British case. In many European countries—notably France, Germany, Italy, and subsequently Sweden—as well as in Britain—problems confronting cinema were apprehended as a combination of Hollywood hegemony and a general stagnation of imagination. As argued by Steve Neale, the birth of art cinema as “an institution” often resulted from the perception that these problems were “national” problems. As he argued, “Stretching back from Malraux’s policies as French Minister of Culture, through Swedish Art Cinema after the Second World War, . . . through Blasetti’s polemics in Cinematografico to Erich Pommer’s policies as head of production of UFA, concern with national cinematic traditions has remained a constant in Art Cinema and the discourses it has involved.”26 Scholars have since complicated and/or challenged Neale’s national paradigm but retained his emphasis on art cinema as an institution.27 In the British discourse on “quality films,” nationalism was rife. The imposition of “foreign manners, talk and thought” upon the British character had to be resisted, though “chauvinism” was to be avoided at all costs (ACQ, 22). The goal was to achieve an internationalist compact through different national cinemas whereby “peoples of the world get to know each other, . . . understand how their neighbours live, . . . their difficulties, . . . desires, . . . the fears of different nations” (quoted in ACQ, 22). Literature had been tasked with these functions in the past; cinema was more effective for the twentieth century. Despite the advent of “Free Cinema” and filmmakers and critics such as Lindsay Anderson, Gavin Lambert, Penelope Houston, Peter Ericsson, Karel Reisz, and Alan Cooke (who argued for an expansion of specialized cinemas that showed older films, as well as those from the continent and by new American filmmakers to cater to the growing film society movement in Britain), the argument for good films that combined art and entertainment with national culture remained strong. In India, quite distinct from the above, the urgency of the national question was signaled differently by the report’s repeated exhortation to the new Indian state. But anything “national” in India was also complicated by the fact that “each linguistic group” in the country was “of the size of a full-fledged nation in the West” (R, 11). Indian art cinema has from the start faced the tension between being showcased as “national” in festivals and by critics, and the indelible stamp of regionalism. Indeed, Rajadhyaksha argues that the national status belonged to the Bombay-based Hindi film industry, where the “all-India film” was made by three schools of “national movie-making, all claiming some form of a national cinema status with no support from the independent nation.”28 It was in this global context that the report of 1951 spoke of efforts to “upgrade” the “general and intellectual level” of film audiences in order to ensure a growth of public conscience, spread film literacy, and expand agencies for the cultivation of public taste and enlightenment. To foster an environment

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of film pedagogy, the report made several recommendations: the creation of a “Film Council” with wide powers to oversee the different aspects of production, exhibition, and distribution of films; the establishment of an institute of film art in Bombay with plans for setting up similar institutions in other important film production centers; the establishment of a central film library in Delhi; the further development of the Films Division to encourage the production of short films that would also train aspiring directors; the revamping of the cartoon film unit established in 1944, and so forth (see R, 51–55).29 These recommendations matched the mood of a small minority in Indian film circles. The then little-known director Ritwik Ghatak wrote impassioned letters in the early 1950s to owners of a major studio in Bombay, Filmistan, urging them to make films with “low budgets, no stars, no good equipment, no fancy names in technicians, no massive sets, no legendary music director, and no colour—just ideas.”30 Much more powerful however was a push back from the film industry, particularly in Bombay and Calcutta, in an attempt to uphold the “essential role of the film producer as an entertainer rather than as an educator.” The mouthpiece of the Bengal Motion Picture Association wanted to have it both ways when they both “welcomed” the West Bengal government’s financial support to an “art picture,” Pather Panchali, that “brought much prestige to the Indian film-makers,” while at the same time discouraging such gestures in the future as an “encroachment on the trade’s jurisdiction.”31 Even Patil later appeared to detract from his earlier emphasis on the educational value of entertainment.32 As a result, most of the recommendations of the Patil committee went into cold storage for over a decade after 1951. In a speech delivered to the Film Federation of India in March 1955, S. S. Vasan, the president of the federation, sought to reconcile the educative and recreational goals of a film while noting with some irony that it is now assumed that “Recreation” or “Entertainment” is quite devoid of instructional effect, these being a kind of antithesis to all things “educational.” It is tacitly assumed that there can be no education in a Cinema show. I don’t think that any intelligent man really believes this. But this is how we act. A play by Shakespeare does not set about to teach anything in particular. But a knowledge of Shakespeare certainly makes a man better able to talk even about turnips.33

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that aside from the Films Division that was established in Bombay in 1948, there was little by way of governmental initiative for the promotion of the equivalent of “quality films” in India.34 By the early 1960s, when such initiatives began to take shape in different parts of the country in the form of the National Film Archive, the Film Institute, the Central

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Film Library, and the Film Finance Corporation, the category of art cinema was already in use. We therefore need to turn our attention to the world of the artist and the critic during the crucial decade of the 1950s in our effort to reconstruct the Indian past of the global, yet shifting, category of the art film.

A Film Missionary Marie Seton was a crucially important purveyor of European, British, and American discussions of art cinema in India. She first visited India in 1955 as an invitee of the Ministry of Education to “speak on various aspects of cinema,”35 and returned to India several times thereafter. She worked tirelessly to spread “film appreciation” among cineastes in the country. Seton’s first visit occurred in the wake of the first international film festival (1951–52) and the formation of film societies around the country. Prior to her visit, Seton had had different associations with Indians who stoked her curiosity about India’s freedom movement. Examples include D. G. Tendulkar, whom she met in Berlin in 1932 as “a mathematics student, who later authored some notable works on Gandhiji.”36 Seton had written a letter of introduction for Tendulkar to Eisenstein when the former expressed a desire to study with the Russian filmmaker. Tendulkar, we are told, “was in a way responsible for her coming to India” in the 1950s.37 The other person who deepened her interest in India was the future diplomat and defense minister, V. K. Krishna Menon, whom she met in London when he was involved in building up the India League. Menon apparently “was Marie’s lifelong obsession.”38 Seton was instrumental in getting clearances for Ray’s debut feature, Pather Panchali, that allowed it to be exhibited at the Cannes film festival in 1956, and later wrote a biography entitled Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (1971). Her article on her travels through India and her two books, The Art of Five Directors: Film Appreciation (1961), and Film as an Art and Film Appreciation (1964), offer evidence—in the Indian context—of the first self-conscious deployment of the distinction between art and entertainment cinema. Before discussing her writings, however, it would be important to contextualize Seton. “I’m extremely bad at putting my own biography together, because it very nearly embraces the world and it has been very diverse,” wrote Seton in a letter dated November 21, 1974. Nevertheless, let us hear about her life first in her own words: I was born March 2, 1910 of Scottish-Irish parentage about 18 miles from London at Walton-on-Thames. I had the benefit of the most internationally minded family and by the age of 15 I’d just about met the whole human race, which explains virtually everywhere I’ve been and everything I’ve done, the doing

1.1 Above, Marie Seton and actor Karuna Banerjee, courtesy of Sandip Ray; below, Marie Seton and Satyajit Ray, courtesy of Sandip Ray.

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largely by “chance” or “accident.” I’m supposedly an “expert” in film. As to education I went to several private schools, but anything like a formal education ended at the age of 16 and a half and all else is in the category of self education. What I’m known in some circles for is salvaging Eisenstein’s unfinished Mexican film (Que Viva Mexico) under the title Time in the Sun, and for the biography of Paul Robeson, 1958 . . . Panditji, a Portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1967, . . . Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray, 1971, all of them fat books, heavily illustrated and a great diversity of other writing. Of the last 18 years, I’ve spent roughly 8 of them in India and I’m off to Delhi at the end of December.39

Apart from being a noted author, Seton was a film society activist (as was Bazin), and during her years in the U.S. organized film programming for various trade unions.40 Her trip to India was partly funded by the British Film Institute. Seton’s first essay on India, “Journey Through India,” published in Sight and Sound, reflected the critical British and European disposition on cinema both of the war and postwar years. Above all else her writings sought to highlight the point that despite the pressure of “commercial considerations” there existed critical energies in many places—Britain, continental Europe, the U.S., and now India—represented by “numerous people . . . who would like, if possible, to inject new ideas and explore the medium more fully” (JI, 201). The opening paragraph of the article stated that despite the fact that Indian cinema was the third-largest industry in the world, it was not until films such as Pather Panchali (1955) and Munna (1954) were made that Indian films caught the attention of the “West.” She hailed these two films as having “broken through some restricting conventions that have previously handicapped Indian films with European audiences” (JI, 198). It is worth citing in full the last paragraphs from “Journey to India” as it sets the tone and gives us the parameters by which Seton, in future works, would articulate the distinction between “film as an art” and the “entertainment film.” It is this background of the changing and unchanging Indian scene that the Indian cinema reflects. Time and again during my Indian tour I kept recalling scenes from the Bengali film Pather Panchali. In place after place, and not only in Bengal, I met the particular quality in people that Satyajit Ray has so movingly evoked on the screen. In Bombay and its suburbs there are scenes of daily life which have found expression in K. A. Abbas’s Munna. (The mother in this film is a building worker and all over India one sees women at work on new buildings.) In Calcutta, the only city where there are still man-drawn rickshaws, I saw scenes which recalled to my mind Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land) long considered India’s best film before Pather Panchali. As the ancient tradition of caste breaks down in India, so more and more directors are coming to see their country and its people with a realistic eye and a warm humanism. This is how we in the West seek to see India. (JI, 202)

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There was at work in Seton’s lectures and writings on India a process of canon formation, emphasizing the principle of universal accessibility of “art films” whereby particulars of locality were made legible to a Western/universal audience. This is what qualified Pather Panchali and Munna, in Seton’s estimation, as works of art. She makes no mention, for example, of films such as Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (Lowly City, 1946), which won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film,41 or Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1951), a film that was shown in the former USSR after it won the appreciation of V. I. Pudovkin and N. Cherkasov during their visit to India.42 Neecha Nagar and Chinnamul do not exhaust the list of realist Indian films made during the immediate pre- and postindependence years.43 I invoke them here to show that there was an interesting process of elision at work in Seton’s selection despite her repeated emphasis on realism and neorealism as important elements in an art film. “Journey Through India” combines the tone of a colonial-era missionary eager to spread new knowledge in a place where it was seen as lacking, but approaching the task with a humility that was apposite in a newly decolonized world. It records Seton’s struggle to come to grips with the bewildering variety of Indian life. The struggle manifested itself in contradictory statements. There are sentences in which Seton registered the difficulty of apprehending the complexity of India. Soon after she made confident assertions about “the real India” and about India being “perhaps the most complex country and culture in the world, and nothing one can say of it is absolute.” As she wrote: “I felt a need to see something of India as quickly as possible, since Bombay was not India. It had always been my understanding that the village was India, that the villager kept alive the Indian heritage.” These observations are interspersed with extended descriptions of her Indian experiences that, she noted, “gave me an approach to my own work” (JI, 199, 200). Essential to Seton’s Indian experience on that first visit was the coexistence of what she perceived as timeless tradition and a contrasting process of modernization. Note the following description of a trip from Poona to Mahabaleshwar. “I found myself a dot swallowed up in a multitudinous surge of Indian life: I surprised no-one and to tell the truth no-one surprised me.” An extended description of Mahabaleshwar where she stayed in a bungalow of a “holiday camp” that had sprung up in the compound of a former government house offers further elaboration on this theme. “The decaying adaptation of the English country house symbolized past and present: the formal garden still dotted with the forms of neo-classical stone vases which had never been drilled out to make them usable for anything; while the huge rooms have become dormitories for teachers taking refresher courses.” About the inhabitants in the surrounding area she wrote, “Every day we walked miles through semi jungles, meeting Marathe [sic] villagers whose mode of life has not changed in a thousand years. Yet here and there the road or path is lighted by a London lamp-post of the

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gaslight era.” Evoking this copresence of the past with the present, she continued, “We went to ancient villages where life circles around the Siva temple with its anatomically phallic altar, and to scientifically run bee farms where jars of honey looked as if they contained pounds of the rainbow. We found our way to the battleground of Sivaji, the Maharashtrian hero, where an old villager and his withered wife begged for a pice [the lowest unit of Indian currency], and took a rowing boat out on a prim lake with a neat little café which could have been anywhere in the world” (JI, 200). These opposites, so ubiquitous in everyday life, led her to muse: “Surely India would produce a new Eisenstein, for one’s impression is of a fabulous montage of imagery, all the more striking as the expression of man because so much of the landscape is dull and innocuous” (JI, 200). We also notice in her words a tendency to privilege images over the linguistic diversity of India as though the visual were a surer guide to the essence of India than the confusing Babel of languages. “Indian films,” she continued, “must be seen and criticized in the light of what I could learn of the life they reflected, or failed to reflect; while international films should be presented to Indian audiences in relation to whatever I could find in India that could afford a parallel” (JI, 200). Jean Bhownagary, the deputy chief producer of the Films Division which at the time released some hundred and fifty documentaries, and M. D. Bhatt, chief of the Central Board of Film Censors, were keen that Seton draw up a proposal for the development of film societies in India to make the most of an atmosphere in which many agreed “a critical appraisal of cinema and film history represented something new and stimulating” (JI, 199). Seton reported speaking to diverse audiences in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Delhi, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Mysore, and Agra, primarily in film societies or in educational institutions, encouraging the latter to set up film clubs, but also among villagers who were encountering the moving image for the first time through the films she carried with her. Her accounts of these visits confirm that she was a person with a mission who saw the success of her project reflected in the crowds that thronged her events. She visited a Gaya college some three months after the release of Pather Panchali in Calcutta. Expecting no more than twenty-five to fifty people, she took with her “Eisenstein’s Mexican film,” a Czech cartoon, and a third film on Giotto’s frescoes of the life of Christ. Not only did “three or four thousand people” show up to the college campus but they waited patiently through a power outage for the screening to resume. “People came to see me in droves the next day and they said they were fed up with the commercial films on which they were fed. Would I not try to persuade the government to make films like that of Eisenstein. I was astounded.”44 Seton was a firm believer in the role of film societies as educational institutions for she held that historically it was students who have been most “responsive” to watching challenging films. She cited film societies in

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Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge established in 1925, and the Documentary Film group of the University of Chicago as evidence for this claim.45 She introduced and screened Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928), Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930), Kameradschaft (Georg Pabst, 1931), Le Million (René Clair, 1931), L’Idée (Berthold Bartosch, 1932), Papageno (Lotte Reiniger, 1935), and her own Time in the Sun (1940), a film she had put together out of footage from Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico (1931). Her talks ranged from “Film Appreciation; Drawings that Walk and Talk (the history of animation and trick films); Eisenstein’s Life and Work; Eisenstein in Mexico; Film Societies and Documentary Films” (JI, 199). The only time that Seton mentions interacting with someone from the Bombay film industry was when she received an invitation from Raj Kapoor, the noted Indian actor, director, and producer, requesting her to bring Eisenstein’s work to his studio for screening to the staff. Seton described Kapoor as “the actor-producer who is endeavouring to raise standards in the entertainment film” (JI, 200). The National Council of Educational Research and Training and the National Institute of Audio-Visual Education published two of Seton’s books—The Art of Five Directors: Film Appreciation and Film as an Art and Film Appreciation—in 1961 and 1964, respectively. Coming at the end of the Nehru years, both books were explicitly aimed at developing “film appreciation” as a “subject for study in extra-curricular activities of our educational institutions” and among film societies in the country.46 Both books were premised on certain basic assumptions about the meaning of art cinema. First was that filmmaking was an art, despite its industrial/mechanical nature. Seton noted that “there are many levels of film production just as there are many levels of literature, the pictorial arts and music.” Second, just as there were “levels” in all the aforementioned fields of arts ranging from the “popular which is often crude to the most refined and experimental,” so also were there levels in cinema. She compared the development of taste in films to the process of appreciating music that might range from “sentimental film songs to classical ragas.” Appreciation of a classical raga required “concentration” and “cultivation.” “Exactly the same cultivation of appreciation is true for films.”47 Statements such as these clue us into Seton’s appreciation for Ray, who often chose sound, particularly instrumental Indian music, over dialogue in many memorable moments in his films. Building on Paul Rotha’s comment that the “almost the whole potential of the cinema as an instrument of public education has been neglected by the industry’s controllers in their pursuit of big returns” (quoted in FA, 2), Seton observed that “the majority of films in most countries correspond to the level of popular music” (AFD, 3). Notwithstanding these hurdles, different countries of the world were witnessing “the production of intelligent and mature films.” Film appreciation was concerned with this latter category of films. As a

1.2 Marie Seton,

flowchart for Bicycle Thieves, from The Art of Five Directors, 72. Courtesy of NFAI, Pune.

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critical practice it enabled “people to separate the chaff from the grain of cinema.” Its goal was “to cultivate a taste for the grain” (FA, 2, 3). These “mature” films—her Indian example was Pather Panchali—and “their parallels in all countries are not at first appreciated as easily by the mass of the people as the popular commercial film, as [the former] are more subtle and refined. They are made with a more conscious appeal to the intelligence and to what is called ‘the film sense.’ Appreciation of films like these, and of all major film classics calls for the development of an awareness of film as an art” (AFD, 3). Films that were not an “average entertainment film, or strictly instructional or information films” required a special mode of looking (AFD, 3). Average “entertainment films” gave little thought to the deployment of specifically cinematic qualities. Emphasizing this element, she argues that until people developed an awareness of visual composition, camera movement, and narrative style, “all films remain more or less unseen” (AFD, 66). Film appreciation, a task to be carried out primarily by film societies in India as it had been in Britain, required teaching people the nuances of “cinematic expressiveness” that was of a different order altogether from “theater dramas transferred to celluloid, or a literal translation to the screen of a literary work” (AFD, 3). Thus, those engaged in film appreciation as a pedagogic practice should be concerned “not only with the content and social import of the film” but specifically with “1. How a film is built up visually through each sequence, and from one sequence to another. 2. The relation of the sound to the images, or where, . . . sudden silence becomes extremely effective. 3. The structure of the story; that is how the scenario is developed” (AFD, 4). The majority of Indian films in her opinion were extremely weak on the last point “for generally Indian scenarios are too complex in structure” (AFD, 4). At the end of the first book, Seton even provided the order in which film societies could organize an event with films they could borrow from the Central Film Library, New Delhi. Here is a typical example she provided for a program to develop film appreciation among film club members. “As a start . . . I would suggest Hello Elephant (Gianni Franciolini, 1952), Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) or Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948) because, apart from their special cinematic qualities and their remarkable evocation of atmosphere, these films are not difficult for any group of people to appreciate. One should not start off with a too complex film” (AFD, 67). These would be followed up with any one of the “film classics”: Potemkin, Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948),48 or Pather Panchali. If Potemkin offered audiences the “panorama of a mass movement,” Bicycle Thieves was a contrasting study with its sensitive portrayal of “individual characters representing very ordinary people.” Pather Panchali was a “very good choice because it is India’s unique film classic” (AFD, 67).

1.3 Marie Seton, flowchart for Pather Panchali, from The Art of Five Directors, 71. Courtesy of NFAI, Pune.

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The book also contained a detailed elaboration of each of these themes through a close look at specific films by Flaherty, Eisenstein, de Sica, Lean, and Ray.49 Seton’s choices were partially dictated by the films that were available in the Central Film Library in New Delhi, an institution that gave borrowing rights to film societies.50 The main criterion, however, for the films discussed in The Art of Five Directors was their humanism. Echoing the British discourse on quality films discussed above, her examples served “each in its own way, to extend the horizon of man’s understanding of man and of the cultures which go to make up the world we inhabit” (AFD, 68). And she returned to her point about the superiority of images over words when she wrote “film is the art most expressive of our century. . . . Only books can travel as far afield as the film, but with books there is a certain language barrier.” In the “best” of films—and her book contained an exposition of some select ones—“it is the images which convey the meaning more clearly than words” (AFD, 68). In Seton’s choice of the five directors there was an implicit hierarchy. Eisenstein ruled the roost as a “genius” and as a “Scientist of the Film” (AFD, 19). Flaherty was described as the fourth in a “quartette” of filmmakers comprising D. W. Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin, and Sergei Eisenstein “whose innovations have made a lasting impact on cinema” (AFD, 8). Despite some sociologically inclined critics dismissing him as romantic, Seton endorsed Paul Rotha’s view that Flaherty “reconstructs native life of a past or dying generation” (AFD, 9). She described Vittorio de Sica as the neorealist chronicler of solitude during World War II, who succeeded in establishing that a “good film” that dealt with basic human emotions has universal appeal across cultural and political barriers (AFD, 45–48). David Lean was chosen as someone who employed “elements of the art film in the more mature type of entertainment film” (AFD, 51). Significantly absent in both books are any mention of Indian directors with the exception of Ray, who we are repeatedly told “put the Indian film on the world map of cinematography” (AFD, 65).51 The canon of art cinema in India as disseminated by this little-known British critic was now complete. And Ray was made into the national emblem of Indian film art. Many film society members from the 1950s and 1960s invoke Seton’s role as a teacher with much respect.52 She is acknowledged for influencing the Indian government to establish the Film Institute in Poona. In 1984 she was honored with a Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian honor officially bestowed in India. Her role in the film society movement and in the cause of “good cinema” is memorialized in biographical accounts of Mrs. Gandhi, who served as minister of Information and Broadcasting and as the vice president of the Federation of Film Societies in India before she became prime minister.53 In her introduction to Film as an Art and Film Appreciation, Seton herself offered two examples by way of illustrating the success of her efforts to spread an awareness of art cinema in India. Immediately after the publication of The Art of Five Directors, she

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reported that the Calcutta Film Society held a festival that showed five films by Eisenstein. She recounted, “A public discussion was held with two of Bengal’s younger film directors, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, taking part with three other people. This is an example of film appreciation being carried to an audience of some 700 people” (FA, 3). Seton’s second example of the “general public” demonstrating an appreciation of “better Indian films” was Ray’s film Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961) which was screened in mainstream theaters in Delhi, unlike Pather Panchali that was only screened on Sunday mornings at the Delite theater in the national capital (FA, 3).54 This, together with the wide appeal generated among the public for India’s second international film festival in 1961, and the rapid spread of film societies in numerous cities and towns all over India, were for her signs that the art cinema had finally arrived on the Indian film scene (see FA, 3–7).

Film as Art: The Hybrid Identity of Indian Art Cinema But why did the sense of art cinema articulated by Seton appeal to Indian cineastes? One explanation must lie in what I have described as the aspirational nature of the category. Long before Seton’s arrival, Indian intellectuals had engaged with the idea of film as an art and “good cinema” without being in a position to make films. The opening editorial statement by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894–1950), author of the books that Ray later made into his Apu trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959), in the journal Chitralekha (Image-Writing) published on November 15, 1930, expressed impatience with the standard apologia put forth for the film fare churned out in India. Cinema, he argued, should be placed alongside the fine arts, literature, theater, and science. He added that there was a universal yardstick of judgment that applied to these practices in all “civilized” countries of the world. The plea that a different set of rules be deployed to judge “us” (Indians) due to our putative “infancy,” “ignorance,” and “weakness” seemed churlish. With a boldness reminiscent of the prevailing mood of anti-colonialism, Bandyopadhyay announced a moment of arrival for Indian cinema when it should aspire to stand tall amidst all other artistic cultures of the world and declare: “Here is our poetry, our images, our history, our novels, our theater—measure them according to the yardstick set by your ‘International Bureau of Standards’—we do not seek the indulgence, overlordship, or preference, proffered to the weak by the strong.”55 That this was still all rather aspirational is indicated by the fact that this journal together with other contemporaneous books and articles on cinema were mainly dedicated to an analysis of elements that elevated a wide array of European and American films into “art” with an accompanying lament about the state of films made in Bengal and other parts of India. Rather than belong to

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any particular genre, country, or style, films that qualified as art in the estimation of these writers were bewilderingly eclectic. Thus, the Bengali poet Narendra Deb clubbed together The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) with a host of Hollywood films, both silent films and talkies, as instances of good cinema.56 Another writer Nikhil Sen, writing for the Calcutta-based journal Filmland in January 1931, found “great fault with Indian films” for “we do not use the camera as a means of expression, we do not use it enough, not well enough.”57 As examples of those who did so successfully, he cited “Pabst and Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Kirsanoff and Dreyer and Deslaw.” Putting the power of the image over words, this writer noted, “poetry builds its atmosphere with words. . . . Cinema is more direct, it brings the image straight . . . it can arouse in the human mind reactions from the subconscious. A film to that end was attempted by Buñuel in [Un] Chien Andalou.”58 Seton’s message resonated with a section of Indian film enthusiasts who had long been seeking universality for their native cinema. The founding of film societies from 1947 and their rapid proliferation ensured that the discourse about art film gained momentum in the 1950s. Yet, this discursive activity was also precisely what challenged the assumed universality of art cinema. By way of making this final point, let us turn to the film scene in West Bengal around the time of Seton’s visit. Ray, Ghatak, Sen, Ghosh, and other Bengali directors who would go on to make films that today qualify as “art cinema,” were deeply moved by Italian neorealist, Soviet, and Eastern European films that were screened in Calcutta during the first international film festival (1951– 52), before Seton’s visit.59 Articles published in the Bengali press during and after the festival testify to the ways in which ideas about being a “film worker” took shape in the postindependence milieu amidst spirited discussions about film as art. Mrinal Sen, who was still several years away from making his first film declared, for instance, that a dedicated film functionary was someone who “nurtured a deep respect for the audience, strove to analyze life in a thoughtful manner, and was sensitive to the wants, needs, demands, hopes, and anxieties of the ordinary person in order to communicate these with utmost dedication through the most advanced art form that was cinema.”60 Indeed it is important to remember that much before Ray’s Pather Panchali, and even prior to the exposure of Indian audiences to the Italian neorealists, Ghosh made Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1950) and Ghatak completed work on Nagarik (Citizen, 1952). While neither of the two films received even a fraction of the acclaim of Pather Panchali, nor made their way into Seton’s canonical listing of art films, their very making was testimony to a desire to diversify modes of expression and narration within Indian cinema circles. The success of the film festival or even Seton’s endeavors would have been unimaginable without an already existing climate for the reception of films

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that marked a departure from the standard fare doled out by Indian film industries and Hollywood. The two “younger film directors” Seton referred to in her 1964 statement, Sen and Ghatak, were actually not so young compared to Ray, the only Indian who made it into Seton’s pantheon. By 1964, Sen and Ghatak had completed five and six films respectively. While Sen’s best works were by his own admission yet to come, Ghatak’s films Nagarik (The Citizen, 1952–53), Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy, 1957), Bari Theke Paaliye (The Runaway, 1958), Meghe Dhaka Tara (The CloudCapped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E-Flat, 1962), and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, completed in 1962 but released in 1965), had evoked much comment, both critical and deeply appreciative, in film circles in Calcutta. I discuss this further in later chapters. Film society members, as well as Ghatak’s filmmaking confreres such as Ray, however, recognized signs of his extraordinary talents from the beginning of his directorial career in the 1950s. In an autobiographical reflection on Ghatak, Ray recounted being introduced to him by Ghosh at a meeting of the Calcutta Film Society of which Ghosh was one of the earliest members. Ghatak had a small acting role in Ghosh’s Chinnamul. Subsequently, during the editing of his second feature film Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) at the Bengal film laboratory, Ray learned that the studio had in its possession a print of Ghatak’s debut film Nagarik. “We immediately watched it. There was no doubt that the film had been completed amidst tremendous difficulty. Outwardly it lacked in polish. Yet at its core were certain qualities that evoked tremendous respect in my heart for that young filmmaker.”61 About Ajantrik, he wrote “I watched it in the first show. It made me realize how far a true artist could advance in one step provided he was given the freedom and opportunity to work.” Ray blamed the commercial failure of Ajantrik to its uniqueness.62 It took “phenomenal courage” on Ghatak’s part to make a film whose hero was a taxi driver and whose heroine was his jalopy. Ghatak’s “anthropomorphism,” as evidenced in the driver’s relationship with the car, was an unprecedented experiment in the world of Bengali and even Indian cinema (RG, 27–28). Ray’s concluding lines from this article written after Ghatak’s death are worth citing for they give us insight into how anomaly or difference entered Seton’s purportedly universal category of art cinema and made it a complex, confusing, and contested term in India of the 1950s and early 1960s. “Ritwik’s films were devoid of any Hollywood influence that had permeated most of our works to a greater or lesser extent. This was partly because we had very little opportunity between 1925–1955 to watch any foreign films other than from Hollywood. Some of Ritwik’s films bore the influence of the Soviet masters” (RG, 29). Ray qualified that “influence” should not be read as “blind emulation,” for Ghatak’s originality was one of his most striking traits. And overpowering any “influence,” in Ray’s opinion, was Ghatak’s grounding in the “soil of Bengal.”

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“Ritwik,” wrote Ray, “was a Bengali director to the core, a Bengali artist—much more Bengali than even I am. This is to me his biggest trademark, his most precious and significant trait” (RG, 29). Ray’s remarks are significant because they point to a problem that goes to the heart of the international or even national reception of the category of films Seton names as art cinema. The problem has to do with an appreciation for films that braided the local with the popular to create a cinema that departed from the normative aesthetic of neorealism and universal humanism championed by Seton. An understanding and appreciation of Ghatak’s films requires situating his work in the context of his deeply personal and dogged commitment to exploring the anguish of partition among the displaced Bengali Hindu middle classes of East Pakistan. His use of melodrama, folk theatrics, and dialect drew much from his days in the Communist-led Indian People’s Theater movement. These, together with his ironic and frequent references to Hindu religious iconography, especially in framing his central female characters at crucial moments in his films, and his use of songs combined with instrumental music to express affect, led to spirited debate among film society members about the relationship between the formal aspects of cinema and political ideologies. Influenced by C. G. Jung, Ghatak himself identified such preoccupations with his exploration of the Bengali collective unconscious. Writing about Meghe Dhaka Tara, for example, he observed that the film’s tragic heroine “Nita . . . unconsciously subscribes to and perpetuates the image of Jagaddhatri—the benevolent aspect of the Mother Goddess—which is fully realized in the complementary extensions of her mother (the destructive Chandi) and her sister Gita (the sensual extension of the female principle).”63 Ghatak frequently brought together Hindu mythology folklore, realist time and mythopoeic times, to reflect critically on the postcolonial condition.64 The attrition of Nita’s life in Meghe Dhaka Tara due to her struggles to keep her erstwhile middle-class family afloat in their displaced plight in a refugee colony affords an opportunity to analyze the ways in which Ghatak disrupted the desired legibility of the object Seton called art cinema. Nita’s slow and relentless march toward death is built up through the entirety of the film. Our apprehension that such a grim eventuality is inevitable is awakened early in the film in the scene where she hobbles to work ignoring the broken strap of her worn out sandals; or when the colony shopkeeper hails her as “Sindbad the sailor” as he berates her brother for resting idly on Nita’s tired shoulders. Every family member who she professes to love to death—her mother, sister, father, and even her beloved older brother—sucks Nita’s life out of her by depending on her earnings and emotional care. In one of the film’s heightened emotional moments, Ghatak conveys the demonic anxiety provoked by the mother’s fear of losing the family’s sole breadwinner, Nita, if she marries her boyfriend of many years. The soundtrack of this scene is an escalating noise of

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rice boiling while the image shows the mother’s face looming into a close-up from the side, blurred somewhat by the smoke of the open-air charcoal stove and steam from the boiling rice. As she lifts the corner of her sari to cover her quivering lips, the bubbling sound of boiling rice gets louder as if to register her mounting fear that there may be no more rice, or indeed, no more coal for the stove, should Nita leave home after marriage. However, later, when Nita is sick with tuberculosis, she is asked by her grief-stricken and desperate father to leave the house to protect her pregnant younger sister and the unborn child. An Uma-sangeet, traditionally associated in Bengali folk and puranic lore with the lament of Menaka, the mother of the Hindu goddess Uma/Durga/ Parvati, on the occasion of the latter’s departure from her parent’s home to journey to her husband Shiva’s abode, plays in the background as Nita steps out into the torrential rain.65 Nita’s face shows splatters of the blood she has been coughing up, an ironic substitute for sindoor (vermillion), regarded as auspicious on a married woman. The spinster Nita’s gaze directed at the stormy sky, in a manner reminiscent of the visage of Durga idols when they are immersed into the holy river Ganges, is framed looking upwards. Such framing would become Ghatak’s signature, repeated in later films such as Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas, 1973) and Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Tale, 1974).

1.4 Durga immersion, Kolkata. Courtesy of Associated Press.

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1.5 Ghatak’s signature framing: Meghe Dhaka Tara. Courtesy of NFAI, Pune.

Ray’s description of Ghatak as “much more Bengali” than himself were clearly allusions to these nuances of the latter’s craft. His remark can also be read as a cryptic explanation for his inclusion and Ghatak’s exclusion from the canon of art cinema as elaborated upon by Seton. Ghatak’s use of images was not aimed at transcending the limits of words. Indeed, I will return to the centrality of the song and their literary significance in the formal composition of Ghatak’s films. As the brief discussion of Meghe Dhaka Tara demonstrates, he brought together sonic elements from the Bengali everyday—the

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1.6 The female face in Ghatak. Above, Subarnarekha; below: Jukti Takko aar

Gappo. Courtesy of NFAI, Pune.

sound of boiling rice, for instance—together with puranic and folkloric elements such as in the use of agamani and baul (mystic) songs. His relentless exploration of death invoked by framing Nita’s face in a manner analogous to the immersed face of Durga idols, and her cry at the end of the film, “I want to live,” reverberating in the hills where she is taken by her brother to die in a sanatorium, has its lineages in stage melodramas of the Indian Peoples’ Theater movement. These elements alluded to in Ray’s Bengali comment also marked the inaugural moment in a debate about Ghatak’s works that has exercised Indian film

1.7 The female face in Ghatak, continued. Titas Ekti Nadir Naam. Courtesy of NFAI, Pune.

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studies scholarship from the 1980s as to whether or not his films belong to the category called art cinema, and if he should be regarded as an auteur.66 In its push for an appreciation of the local, folk, mythic, and melodramatic as good cinema, Ray’s appreciation of Ghatak widens the discussion of film as art beyond the limits sketched by Seton. Deeply rooted in the cultural and regional context from which they arose, the comprehensibility of these film texts to even an Indophile like Seton, had she seen them, would probably have been tenuous at best. Ghatak—and some of his contemporaries as well as latter-day students— stand thus in an anomalous relationship to the category art film as conceived by Seton. An engaged participant at film society screenings and debates in Calcutta before Marie Seton visited the city, Ghatak was deeply invested in developing film into an artistic medium. Yet his films would not quite be classifiable as art cinema by Seton’s schema: they were not cosmopolitan; they did not believe in the “universal accessibility” of the language of films; they mixed elements of the regional, popular, and folk with those drawn from high culture in an effort, actually, to blur the distinction between entertainment and art. Yet it would be impossible to speak to the topic of the Indian art film today without according to Ghatak the status of a pioneer. Seton’s second book, Film as an Art and Film Appreciation, appeared in 1964, the same year that Jawaharlal Nehru, the subject of one of her biographies and India’s first prime minister, died. Nehru’s death, many would argue, marked the end of an era of hope that came with the founding of the new republic. In the turmoil of postcolonial politics from then on, the state and film society activists would task cinema with novel responsibilities. Just as the newly established nation-state had sought a national cinema to further its project of unity, Indian left-wing politics from the 1960s onward challenged this vision as class-inflected, neoimperial, and devoid of radical socially transformative potential. Indian art cinema would henceforth become a minefield of debates— around modernism, left politics, radical aestheticism, and moralism—whose intensity showed how much the category, laden with national and cosmopolitan values, remained open to the changing and ongoing aspirations of Indian cineastes. While the values or meanings inhering in art cinema changed and became new intellectual and aesthetic battlegrounds, art cinema’s value remained undisputed.

CHAPTER 2

THE “NEW” INDIAN CINEMA Journeys of the Art Film

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hat the making of Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen), Uski Roti (His Bread, Mani Kaul), and Sara Akash (The Whole Sky, Basu Chatterjee) in 1969 signaled the arrival of a “new” cinema is now a commonplace of Indian film history.1 Anyone familiar with the films however, will be left wondering just why they are clubbed together as part of a movement. True, they shared a few similarities: the Film Finance Corporation of India (FFC) funded them, they were adapted from fictional works by relatively recent authors writing in Indian languages, and they ostensibly eschewed certain stock features of Indian cinema such as song and dance, battles between the romantic pair and their respective families, action sequences, stark character contrasts between the hero and villain, and so forth. Many of these characteristics were also shared by films that soon followed, by directors such as Shyam Benegal, M. S. Sathyu, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Awtar Kaul, Pattabhi Rama Reddy, and Girish Karnad. These commonalities are not trivial, but are they sufficient to mark a film as part of the Indian New Wave? Sorting through the film-historical record, it is hard not to be struck by the pugnacious character of many of the writings since the late 1960s and 1970s occasioned by this so-called New Wave. Most of them authored by film directors and critics, these essays have either knocked down the idea that there was anything new or movement-like in these films, or hailed their radical newness. In still other instances, critics wanted to distinguish some films within the new cinema rubric as avant-garde and/or experimental from others that were named “middle cinema,” another category that came into vogue at the time. Over time,

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the categories fragmented to include developmental cinema, state cinema, and so forth.2 It would be no exaggeration to say that Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) contributed to this spate and spirit of argumentation. He made the term “Indian New Wave” far more contentious than it would have been otherwise. His was not the only skeptical voice about the claims of “new cinema,” but it was certainly the bestknown and most influential. In his two essays, “An Indian New Wave?” (1971) and “Four and a Quarter” (1974), Ray questioned if there was anything new in the films gathered under the moniker new cinema. Much ink and vitriol was subsequently spilled on proving him wrong. The debate between Ray and his detractors has for a long time masked crucial aspects of the “new cinema” that were indeed novel—its funding structure, its relationship with literature, and its ties to the mainstream film industry. Besides, to arrive at any judgment of the claims of being “new,” to understand what constituted newness, we must look closely at the films themselves. This is the exercise that this chapter undertakes. It looks back upon the phenomenon referred to as the Indian New Wave, some fifty years after the label was invented in Indian cinema. I start with a historical analysis of the writings published at the time, before probing other sources. The chapter closes with a discussion and a close reading of a select sequence from a pioneering film of the Indian New Wave, Bhuvan Shome. The debate around the Indian “new cinema,” and the discussions themselves, signaled a moment of unparalleled ferment in the Indian film scene. My intent is to document that ferment—pregnant with possibilities—without being partisan to either side of the debate. Turning to Bhuvan Shome, I will illustrate the possibilities for newness created by this ferment. I will also show how the film allegorizes the question of novelty through the confusion experienced by its eponymous protagonist, Bhuvan Shome.

Ray and the New Wave Critics, contemporary and recent, have claimed that Ray’s 1971 and 1974 articles represented a kneejerk and conservative dismissal of the work of a younger generation by an established and world-renowned filmmaker. Many critics pointed to the incongruity of Ray’s obliterating the memory of his own difficulties during the making of Pather Panchali, especially of his urge to break free of established patterns in Indian cinema. Ray’s emphasis in the essays on the storytelling function of films and on cinema’s ability to communicate with the audience obfuscated his virtuoso innovations that were constitutive of those functions and could only have resulted from an acute awareness of the materiality of the filmic medium. The essays’ conservative aesthetic perspective is hard to square with Ray’s formal innovations with camera angles, close-ups,

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mise-en-scene, light, music, shot-lengths, pace, and editing to communicate a mood or an emotion, often without words, in ways that were unprecedented in Indian cinema. In writing, he sounded antagonistic to the cinematic avant-garde and to modernist experimentation. Readers familiar with his films, however, would be aware that their formal and aesthetic innovations contradicted the militantly conservative realist stance he now appeared to assume against modernist and avant-garde filmmakers. Ray certainly was a filmmaker who used the medium for “new ways of showing a world on film.” Why then did he oppose, even dismiss outright, others’ cinematic experiments? The 1971 essay “An Indian New Wave?” published in Filmfare is an exposition on the concept and content of novelty in cinema.3 Moving from the silent period in Euro-American cinema to the arrival of sound, Ray dwelled on the innovations of Erich von Stroheim, Jean Renoir, the Italian neorealists, and exponents of the French New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard. He turned in the last section of the essay to the “New Wave of sorts” that was “lapping on the shores of Indian cinema” in order to judge them by the standards he advocated in earlier sections of the essay. The second essay, published in 1974, offered a critical analysis of Ankur (The Seedling, Shyam Benegal, 1974), Garam Hawa (Hot Winds, M. S. Sathyu, 1973), Duvidha (Dilemma, Mani Kaul, 1973), and Maya Darpan (The Illusory Mirror, Kumar Shahani, 1972), four important films of the new cinema.4 Ray began by explaining his understanding of the expression New Wave. An emphasis on experiment was central to claims of newness in the New Wave. But experimentation had always been central to cinema: “The early stages in the evolution of any language must necessarily be a process of trial and error; in other words of experiment. Thus it would be right to say that the pioneers of cinema were all experimenters.”5 Furthermore, since the cinema was a “visual medium of mass communication” there was no contradiction between art and commerce. As he put it, “The cinema was accepted by all concerned as a popular art which drew sustenance from the paying public. It was as simple as that.”6 Read in the context of films associated with the Indian New Wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is hard to miss the barb directed at those who decried pressures of the box office on film art. He went on to note that the “question of esotericism did not arise in the early days” for “all experiment” at the time “was directed towards enriching the language [of cinema] in order to heighten its impact.” The fact that people laughed, and still do, as they watch Chaplin and Keaton, was not due to something innately comical in their appearance, acts, or in the situations they conjured. It was because “they were great artists and great experimenters who discovered the cinematic methods to turn a funny scene on paper into a funny scene on the screen.” Ray’s judgment on experimentation, or the Indian film press’s preferred word for it, “gimmick,” resounds in his closing sentences about the silent era: “There is no such thing

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as an effect for its own sake in the films of the old masters. The true artist is recognizable in his style and his attitude, not in his idiosyncrasies.” Sometimes, experiments took a while to catch on, as was the case with Erich von Stroheim who tried “to purvey a ruthless cynicism to a public which was simply not ready for it.”7 Moving into the sound era, Ray’s chosen figure was Jean Renoir and the film La Règle du Jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939). La Règle du Jeu, wrote Ray, “contained the seeds of the avant-garde that was to emerge twenty years later.” It was “wholly cinematic,” that is to say “it could never have been a play . . . it could not have made a novel.” The task of an avant-garde cinema, above all else, was to distinguish cinema from other media. With a plotline that defied “summarization in seven words,” La Règle du Jeu was a “difficult and demanding film” despite its “surface” comprehensibility. It would have qualified as an “advanced” film by virtue of its content alone.8 But it also contained technical innovations that “are so well integrated into the texture of the film that one hardly notices them.” Ray singled out as exemplary Renoir’s use of deep focus that was occasioned by the need to show “different actions unfolding simultaneously in the same shot in different depths of field.”9 The discussion of deep focus turns next to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. “Both Kane and La Règle treaded on too many corns for their own safety and both were denied immediate access to the box office. Today no one questions their right to be regarded as milestones in the history of cinema,” wrote Ray, concluding this section.10 Ironically, he was unwilling to extend the same measure to the Indian new cinema, leaving readers wondering whether there was truly nothing that qualified these films as “advanced?” Before we move to Ray’s assessment, it would be useful to cast a brief look at the two movements in cinema that he discussed in his essay, Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague. He lists three reasons for the success enjoyed by the neorealists that support his main point about the centrality of narrative in cinema: “(a) the scripts turned out by the writers had superbly organized classical structures; (b) they were deeply human in content; and (c) the directors, particularly Rossellini and De Sica, were first-rate craftsmen with years of solid achievement behind them.”11 In the French New Wave, Ray’s main focus was on Jean-Luc Godard. Godard, he noted, was “the one thorough-going iconoclast” whose innovations put him in the same league as D. W. Griffith. Hence “any analysis of the New Wave unorthodoxy must . . . boil down to an analysis of the methods of Jean-Luc Godard.”12 Godard, more than any other filmmaker associated with the nouvelle vague emblematized for Ray the postwar upheavals in French society. Godard’s formal techniques—“a collage of story, tract, newsreel, reportage, quotations, allusions, commercial short, and straight TV interview”; his dispensing with accepted notions of a “plot line”—were entirely apposite to his films that

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“dealt . . . with unconventional people in an unconventional era.” “The Godard form grew out of the Godard content, and the Godard content has always embraced some aspect of contemporary European youth—journalist, soldier, prostitute, working girl, intellectual—caught in the whirl of modern living.”13 Illustrating these points with a close reading of the opening scenes of Masculin Féminin (1966), Ray argued that abandoning established conventions in Godard’s case was “not a gimmick or an affectation but a positive and meaningful extension of the film language.”14 Or, as he put it elsewhere in the same essay, The audience will put up with the showiest director provided his matter justifies his manner. The modern idiom, unless backed by a genuinely modern attitude to life and society, is apt to degenerate into gimmickry and empty flamboyance. Renoir revealed this attitude in La Règle du Jeu, so did Welles in Citizen Kane, so does Godard in film after film. . . . The New Wave was marked as much by a new syntax as by a new philosophy.15

Ray’s use of “gimmick” as a pejorative epitomizes an affective response and judgment about aesthetic form. As Sianne Ngai explains it, “The gimmick is . . . capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category but also its biggest embarrassment and structural problem.” It is the name attached to the “dissatisfaction” and “fascination” we feel with certain things and is “linked to our perception of [that] object making untrustworthy claims about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value.”16 The context of postcolonial development and scarcity in India made the concept of gimmick even more charged than it would have been in the advanced capitalist societies of the U.S. and western Europe. The appearance of the word in contemporary critical literature is thus far from being value neutral. There is nothing impeachable in Ray’s assessments of particular filmmakers from the silent period up to Godard. It is his general evaluation of new trends in cinema the world over that should give us pause. A near compulsory portrayal of on-screen sex characterized works by “all young directors” from Eastern and Western Europe, the USA, and Japan. “It is significant,” he wrote, “that in the cinema of the West the veering towards unconventionalism has been exactly simultaneous with the growth of permissiveness.” In what sounds like an imputation of bad faith to proclamations of newness, he wrote skeptically that “fragmentation—a modish cinematic device which chops up a scene or statement—has rarely been applied to scenes of sexual encounter.”17 It was as if the new crop of filmmakers made their place in the commercially driven world of cinema through gratuitous displays of sex. The implication clearly was that with few exceptions, such displays were paraded under the guise of novelty. In non-Indian cinemas, they did not feel incongruous as on-screen depictions

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of sex were in keeping with the new culture of sex, pop songs, violence, and drugs in the West. But this was not true of India where “such permissiveness is still a long way off” and the portrayal of on-screen sex was not an option. And yet “the New Wave is being talked about and the off-beat film is becoming a reality.” Ray could be prudish when it came to portrayals of on-screen sexuality. In a 1965 essay he wrote, “Once in a while I feel like having a fling at a hand-held freeze frame, jump-cut New wave venture; but one thing stops me short here: I know I cannot have that bedroom scene that goes with it.”18 These comments suggest that Ray felt that the Indian new wave was a fad with little or no organic relationship to the society from which it arose. What then were the constituents of newness in the so-called new cinema that originated in Hindi films coming out of Bombay? Ray sums up the “average” Hindi film as an amalgam of “colour (Eastman preferred); songs (six or seven?) in voices one knows and trusts; dance—solo and ensemble—the more frenzied the better; bad girl, good girl, bad guy, good guy, romance (but no kisses); tears, guffaws, fights, chases, melodrama; characters who exist in a social vacuum; dwellings which do not exist outside the studio floor; locations in Kulu, Manali, Ooty, Kashmir, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo.” So confident was he of this formula that he repeated it in fictional writing too.19 Any film that left out even one of the above would be regarded as “off-beat.” By this understanding, argued Ray, films such as Anand (Joy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1971) and Mera Naam Joker (My Name Is Joker, Raj Kapoor, 1970) were “off-beat.” Having thus illustrated the idea of the off-beat, Ray asked, “surely this is a far cry from the off-beat in the European sense?” Given Indian censorship rules and the local audience’s expectations of cinema, was “an avant-garde in the European sense . . . a viable proposition in India?” There was no government subvention in India of the kind provided by the Andre Malraux ministry in France that helped promote directors such as Robert Bresson. Nor was the foundation of art theaters imminent in the Indian context. In the absence of money, exhibition outlets, and permissive sex, Indian filmmakers would have to “toe the puritanical-hypocritical line, and not depend wholly on normal channels of distribution and exhibition.”20 Having erected an analytical schema that dismissed new experiments by placing nonnegotiable limits on their conditions of possibility, Ray swiftly moved to dismantle claims of novelty in films such as Bhuvan Shome, Uski Roti, Duvidha, and Maya Darpan. He acknowledged that the Film Finance Corporation showed “admirable courage and enterprise in providing loans to young, untested applicants . . . aspiring to make off-beat films.” But the statement lacked conviction. According to Ray, the new wave in India was the old cinema masquerading as new. It camouflaged some quintessentially conventional

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traits under the veneer of shallow experimentation: actors with star power, background score, stories that were reminiscent of Indian folk tales or other wish-fulfilling narratives.21 Bhuvan Shome, widely regarded as the first of Indian new cinema, elicited some scathing remarks from Ray: “[It] looks a bit like its French counterpart, but is essentially old-fashioned and Indian beneath its trendy habit.” His truculence toward this new cinema trailblazer resounds in the seven-word summary of it he offered: “Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle.”22 In his 1974 essay, “Four and a Quarter,” Ray discussed four films by Shyam Benegal, M. S. Sathyu, Mani Kaul, and Kumar Shahani. This essay, like the previous one, was likely intended for a readership of film aficionados. References to films such as Professor Mamlock (Herbert Rappaport, 1938; Konrad Wolf, 1961; Ray did not specify which version he is referencing), to which he compares Garam Hawa, would not be familiar to the ordinary filmgoer in India. Garam Hawa and Ankur are both described as films “in the tradition of narrative cinema” but widely divergent “from the normal pattern of Hindi films.” Duvidha and Maya Darpan “preserve the narrative framework, but are otherwise emphatically non-traditional.”23 These lines are about as close as one gets to any acknowledgment that there may have been something different about these films marking them out from the run-of-the-mill movies in India. Ray is complimentary about Ankur and Garam Hawa. His remarks on Kaul and Shahani’s endeavors, two films that did not get a theatrical release, however, are unambiguously harsh. A few sentences will give readers a taste of the sharpness of Ray’s prose: “It is strange that both Kaul and Shahani should acknowledge their debt to Ritwik Ghatak, who taught them at Poona, when the only Ghatak trait they seem to have imbibed is a lack of humour. In every other respect—in their avoidance of strong situations and full-blooded characters, in their lack of concern for social issues, in their use of camera and cutting, there is not a trace of Ghatak to be discerned.”24 He is dismissive of Shahani’s allegiance to Robert Bresson with whom the latter had some work experience. “The legacy of that lesson” he writes, “is to be seen in the girl in the center of Maya Darpan. She too, like Mouchette, suffers inwardly and wordlessly. . . . But we are concerned with what happens outwardly. And, here, I am afraid, Bresson evaporates.” In Shahani’s hands, “film language would be threatened with extinction.”25

New, Parallel, Middle . . . Ray’s articles evoked a variety of reactions. If some respectfully disagreed with him—notably Bikram Singh, a journalist for Filmfare with whom he had a series of exchanges—others discussed new cinema more generally without naming

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him.26 Readers, especially in the close-knit world of film societies and film magazines would have no difficulty seeing that these articles were written to refute Ray. Finally, people who were opposed to state support for particular kinds of films and filmmakers instrumentalized Ray’s remarks in a crusade against public spending on cinema.27 It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to reproduce in detail all these responses. Let me briefly touch on some examples from each. The category that Ray used, the “new cinema,” was replaced by a variety of names, all referencing the same body of works, in the three years that passed between Ray’s two essays. The plethora of names that arose fast and loose signaled a ferment in the Indian film world—in terms of the polemics generated, the involvement of the state, and the heated involvement of a small but significant public engaged in cinematic discourse. Such polemics, in evidence in numerous seminars, journal issues, and film society discussion fora, was without precedent in Indian film history. Nor has anything comparable taken place since the debates around new cinema died down in the late 1970s.28 Bikram Singh, the film journalist mentioned above, registered the extraordinariness of the level of discussion around cinema when he wrote in 1973, “The most heartening thing is that the “new,” “parallel,” “counter”—call them what you will— films are being discussed with the kind of seriousness and enthusiasm which Indian cinema has perhaps never before received.”29 Chidananda Dasgupta, the well-known film critic, noted, “the low-budget, realistic, artistically advanced body of films . . . has been defined under a multiplicity of rubrics . . .: Alternative Cinema, New Cinema, Parallel Cinema, Art Cinema, Other Cinema, Personal Cinema, Auteur Cinema, and so on.”30 Dasgupta’s preferred name was “unpopular cinema,” distinguishing this body of films from the commercial, popular cinema. The “unpopular” cinema he argued constituted Indian cinema’s “golden age.”31 Ray’s articles and the numerous responses to him were a symptom of the ferment. One of the earliest uses of the name new cinema in India was in a manifesto written in 1968 by Mrinal Sen, the director of Bhuvan Shome, and Arul Kaul (1933–2007), a film society activist, screenwriter, and critic. Invoking such widely divergent film practices as the French new wave and the American underground film as inspirations, their definition of new cinema was apposite to a manifesto. “New cinema” they wrote, “stands for a film ‘with a signature.’ . . . It engages itself in a ruthless search for ‘truth’ as an individual artist sees it . . . lays stress on the right questions . . . believes in looking fresh at everything including old values and in probing deeper everything, including the mind and conditions of man.”32 In 1970, the expression “parallel” came into use, after the Hindi word “samantar” used by a journalist Arvind Mehta in the magazine Madhuri was picked up by the English daily, the Times of India.33 Ray’s

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articles were probably a response to the loftiness expressed on new cinema’s behalf by filmmakers and critics like Sen and Kaul. The expression new cinema was in use in an article penned by Mani Kaul that reads like a direct response to Ray even though the senior director’s name is not invoked. Published in 1974 in a special issue of the journal Seminar entitled “The Cinema Situation,” it also contained articles by Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and Kumar Shahani. Unlike other contributors, only Shahani and Kaul were introduced in the title page of the journal as the winners of the “national award for the best film in Hindi in 1972” and the “winner of the national award for direction of the best film in 1973” respectively, even though their films were not commercially released in theaters.34 Entitled “Communication,” Kaul’s article is a critique of the two ideas that were at the heart of Ray’s attack on new cinema: their alleged inability to communicate with the audience, and the disavowal of the narrative function of films by some directors. Kaul defines communication as that “which can only be assessed in terms of the quality of experience. The words quality and experience would imply that the one who communicates and the one to whom the communication is directed exist at different levels but that they fall within the bounds of a relationship.”35 Defining communication as quality of experience leads him then to argue that a “successful” filmmaker and the “so-called unsuccessful one” are both failures: the first because he “survives either at expense and ignorance of the very poor or, if he is ‘conscious,’ by shifting his appeal from the vulgar to the intelligent.”36 That is to say, the so-called masala film whose criteria Ray laid out above succeeded by its sensuous appeal to the masses. The “off-beat” film succeeded by eschewing these elements to appeal to more discerning audiences. Both attitudes smacked of elitism to Kaul—the first because it was based on the assumption that people could be beguiled and the second because it presumed the superior intelligence of a select few. The unsuccessful director, wrote Kaul, “survives because of the wide approval or disapproval of or better still, a controversy between critical sections of the press.”37 This description seems to be a reference to himself and Shahani. Their works enjoyed a following among film buffs but evoked controversy within the industry and the mainstream press as narcissistic experimentation. The “unsuccessful” directors’ works defied Ray’s dictum about a “filmmaker” being “prepared to deal with the collective mind, with collective response . . . a peculiar thing which may have nothing to do with what a certain critic or a certain member of the filmmaker’s coterie thinks of his work.”38 Kaul in turn takes another jibe at Ray when he explains realism as the “truthful relationship between the social/individual sensibility of the filmmaker and the cinematic idiom.”39 Thus, a filmmaker who wishes to make a film about a rural setting would be more realistic if his cinema registered the ways in which

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his urban disposition apprehended the materiality of rural life rather than aspire for verisimilitude. He concludes that “communication” had reached a “bottleneck” in India. In his words, “The industrial tradition of mass media, where the ideas of a film maker living in an urban center have to be communicated to the whole of India poses an insurmountable problem. The facile solution of averaging the present conditions and thus exploiting the collective memories and desires of the audience in order to communicate, is the field of commercial and semi-commercial film makers.”40 Needless to say, this goes against the spirit of everything that Ray has written about cinema and his own films. Photographic realism was very important in Ray’s interpretation of the world presented on screen. The vituperative atmosphere of the film world was clear in many articles published in this issue of Seminar. Kumar Shahani’s impassioned essay, “Myths for Sale,” for example, excoriates “plagiarists,” “globe-trotting socialites,” finance sharks, and those adept at “bringing humanism to the box office in outrageous costumes” in an effort, in the words of Ashish Rajadhyaksha, to “carve out a legitimate space for the kind of cinema he supported.”41 Shahani contrasted realism to something he called the “code.” Following up in another essay entitled “The Necessity of a Code,” he explained the code with an example from his teacher Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara.42 In that film, the code manifested itself in the idea of the mother goddess now morphed and distorted in the secular, postpartition life of a refugee family and its three women, each representing one aspect of the goddess—the mother representing the fierce aspect and the two daughters, the sensuous and virtuous ones. The code, in this instance, links the material cultures of the past and present and saturates every aspect of the film—its narrative structure, soundtrack, mise-en-scène, and delineation of space. In Shahani’s understanding the “parallel cinema”—a term he uses interchangeably with the “new”—bore the burden of “building up a self-supporting culture anew.”43 It would not mask the “code” under a veneer of photographic realism that hid “the real problems of society, its class relations.” Moreover, the parallel cinema revealed the deep rupture in Indian “history caused by centuries of colonial and feudal plunder” to audiences thereby destroying the pleasure derived from seamless storytelling and passive consumption.44 Ashish Rajadhyaksha avers that it was Ray that Shahani was hitting out at in his essay “Myths for Sale” as the “biggest charlatan, . . . who after attaining a peak of success should feel so unsteady as to condemn anyone that does not follow in his footsteps.” For Shahani, Ray’s attitudes were symptomatic of “underdeveloped countries” where “it is not uncommon to see insecurity coupled with authoritarianism that stifles all new changes, all attempts at developments.”45 “The Necessity of a Code” was originally part of a three-day symposium on the theme “Parallel Cinema—Approach and Organization” organized during the fifth International Film Festival of India in 1975. Chitrabikshan, the

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journal of the film society, Cine Central, published the papers presented at the event. In the note circulated as a description of the symposium the organizers observed: “What is ‘parallel cinema’ in common usage today, is also known as ‘New wave film’ or ‘Experimental film’ or the ‘Other cult.’ ”46 “The purpose of the symposium” they clarified “was to exchange ideas and information on problems the filmmaker faces, particularly, when he drops ‘Box-Office’ formula to investigate and explore sensitively social and psychological conflicts and tensions in and about him.” That the parallel cinema or the new wave was already a fractured phenomenon was proven by a brief addendum appended to the last article of the symposium. It observed that “there was some commotion during the second session of the symposium” when a section of the participants led by Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, and Dilip Padgaonkar staged a walk-out. . . . Those who walked out held what they described as “parallel symposium” on “parallel cinema” outside the hall. In a resolution they decided to establish cooperatives for production and distribution of “parallel films.” They would approach the Film Finance Corporation for the establishment of a chain of theaters and approach anyone without any inhibition for support. Shri Ritwik Ghatak presided over their meeting.47

An article from Screen, one of the largest circulating film weeklies in India, provides more information on the said walkout. Shahani, Kaul, and several members of the audience left the auditorium in “protest,” we are told, because a panel chaired by B. R. Chopra (1914–2006), older brother of the iconic Bollywood director Yash Chopra (1932–2012), and a “powerful player of the commercial film industry” would serve “no useful purpose.” According to the Screen report, Chopra “said that he was not against the parallel cinema but against some abstract films which did not have any audience appeal and which were protected by the Government and pseudo-intellectual critics. This remark irked the protagonists of the parallel cinema.” Chopra apparently clarified later that he was not against all parallel cinema. Films such as Rajanigandha (Tuberose, Basu Chatterjee, 1974) and Ankur (The Seedling, Shyam Benegal, 1974) “which were appealing to the audience” won his approval. Attacking “abstract” films, he argued: “This is my personal opinion. The critics of the film industry and commercial cinema should also give room for others to criticize the other cinema too. It can’t be one sided.”48 As this and other contemporary writings illustrate, by the mid-1970s, there were sharp divisions between the mainstream film industry and the small group of filmmakers associated with the new wave. In an article entitled “A Doctrinaire Approach,” also published in Screen, one R. Ramakrishna undertook a “critical study” of a speech by the minister of information and broadcasting delivered at a national film awards function. The minister, Nandini Satpathy,

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had allegedly criticized the “film industry” in India for its failure to perform its “social task.” The minister, “is much concerned about the unfinished revolution in India” and the film industry’s “failure” to “portray the Indian reality and national aspirations,” a task she saw being executed to some degree by “new wave” films. Ramakrishna argued the opposite: new wave films were “outlandish” and a failure at reflecting either “Indian reality” or “Indian culture.” Citing the film industry’s success in providing “entertainment” to thousands of viewers despite never having received any backing from the state—both colonial and postcolonial—he alerted the government to the dangers of meddling in cinema.49 Interference by the state, according to Ramakrishna, “may be tolerable” in “books, periodicals, and newspapers” as these were “addressed only to literate and enlightened people.” When it came to the “radio, television, and films,” state interference could have dangerous consequences, as these media were accessible to “the unlettered and unthinking sections of the population.” “Indian filmmakers,” he argued, are primarily story-tellers. Their ambition is to provide entertainment. They are showmen first and showmen last. They have never been guilty of leading the film-goer into error by presenting sordid themes and the seamy side as ways of life. Indian films are purely narratives—a style mostly suited to their unsophisticated audience—and are invariably based on moral themes; the triumph of good over evil. In film-making the producer tries to be objective—that is to be faithful to the story—rather than subjective, that is impose his convictions and introduce “technique” which generally goes above the heads of the poor audience.50

“Art” films, a description he uses interchangeably with the “new wave,” flaunted the “artistic” urges of their makers and sought to “inculcate in the moviegoer a [certain] way of life.” They smacked of “contempt” toward the “cine-goer” as “their doctrinaire ideology and pedagogic postures” denied the audience any “choice in matters social, political, and moral.” While granting the right of an individual filmmaker to articulate his political views on-screen, the author cautioned the government against corralling the entire film industry into a particular ideology. Alleging that the minister was promoting a “political cinema,” he concluded with several suggestions that would make better use of taxpayers’ money. Importantly, the national film awards and institutions such as the Film Institute, the Film Finance Corporation, and the Film Archive should be integrated under one umbrella and placed under one leader so that “they receive the right guidance and inspiration.” The “natural choice” as leader “would be Satyajit Ray, the undisputed master of the medium.”51 There is an element of cynicism in this citation of Ray. That he became the poster

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boy for all those opposed to the Indian new wave does not signal that they are devout followers of Ray’s works—either filmic or written. Writing in the same issue of Seminar as Shahani and Kaul, Dileep Padgaonkar, then a young assistant editor for the Times of India, and also a part of the walkout, noted that “when Mrinal Sen made Bhuvan Shome five years ago, the implications of the term ‘parallel cinema’ could be taken for granted without critical inquiry.”52 Having surveyed the filmmaking scene of 1969–74, Padgaonkar identified parallel cinema as that body of work that was “not geared towards mass entertainment.” That Mani Kaul received the national award for best director for Duvidha in 1973, a film discussed earlier by Ray, was proof for Padgaonkar of a “stringent rebuff” to the film industry that formally announced their rejection of the awards, and a signal that parallel cinema had “gained impressive ground.”53 In a talk delivered to the Raza foundation commemorating Mani Kaul’s work, shortly before his own death, Padgaonkar described his work as “great reflective art” citing Susan Sontag on Robert Bresson.54 In a stirring rejoinder to Ray’s articles, he wrote, Ironically the experiments of Kaul and Shahani have provoked angry polemics not only in the commercial cinema but also within the precincts of parallel cinema itself. That four films which have not had a commercial run could provoke the ire of every director ranging from Satyajit Ray to the latest debutant in the business must surely point to their disturbing qualities. The films have been called boring, slow, repetitive, difficult, academic, Bressonian, Antonionist, Godardian, Bergmanesque, “not-so-relevant-to-the-Indian-context” and so on. Many of these charges were leveled at Satyajit Ray when he made Pather Panchali in 1955. Ray . . . had also acknowledged the influences on him—Soviet filmmakers, Renoir, the Italian neo-realists—but hardly anyone then upbraided him for falling prey to “foreign” examples. Likewise, the accusation of wasting taxpayers money seems . . . quite amusing . . . when it comes from left-wing critics.55

No surprise then that in the introduction to the issue of Seminar, Ray is dispatched off as the director whose film Pather Panchali began a “new Bengali cinema” and showed the way toward filmmaking with integrity and small finances. Having classified Ray as a regional filmmaker, the introduction stated in no uncertain terms that withdrawal of state support (through the FFC) for films that failed to sell would be “disastrous.” Every contributor to the volume argued that support for the new cinema should be extended to the field of distribution of films. “Otherwise where will this very slow motion confrontation between the overpowering, established industry and the emerging new take place.”56 The sharp criticisms faced by Kaul and Shahani revealed to Padgaonkar certain “ambiguities in India’s parallel cinema.” He wrote: “One would be hard

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put to explain the differences in approach between Shyam Benegal’s Ankur and Avishkar made by the commercial director, Basu Bhattacharya; or what—apart from the novelty of the theme— distinguishes M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa from Gulzar’s (another commercial director) Achanak.” The directors could justifiably argue that it was more important that they drew audiences to “good cinema” rather than “repel them with formalist exercises.” Or that it was crucial to the cause of “good cinema” that the funds invested in making the films were recovered. Be that as it may, “those handful of directors” flagged as “the parallel stream,” Padgaonkar concluded, “did not start a novel trend in filmmaking, let alone a movement along the lines of the East European or the Latin American cinema in the mid-sixties.”57 But it did offer a lesson in “democratizing” the sphere of art cinema by putting into the same space filmmakers as diverse as Ray, Benegal, Sathyu, Shahani, and Kaul. Padgaonkar’s was not the only voice arguing in favor of maintaining a distinction between art and commercialism. Chidananda Dasgupta argued that the distinction between “art” and “commercial” cinema was necessary in India, because “Indian commercial cinema never achieved such heights of universalized art” of such Hollywood figures as Hitchcock, Hawks, Chaplin, and Ford.58 The new cinema, he argued, “is the creation of an intellectual elite that is keenly aware of the human condition in India. Not all its protagonists are exercised equally over problems of poverty . . . but there is a basic awareness of these factors even among those who do not construct their films around them. . . . The new cinema expiates modern India’s sense of guilt over its persistent legacy of privilege; this gives it a purpose.”59 Dasgupta identified three waves of the new Indian cinema. The first occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in Bengal. He takes care to qualify it as a “wave” because it included not only Ray and Ghatak but also the likes of Rajen Tarafdar, Partha Pratim Chowdhury, and Barin Saha. The second took place in Bombay and was expressed most clearly in the efforts of Mrinal Sen, Basu Chatterjee, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Shyam Benegal, and M. S. Sathyu. Despite huge differences in their oeuvres, and also the fact that some among them, namely Benegal and Chatterjee, built their “audiences alongside and close enough to the main box-office of the all-India Hindi cinema,” it was in Bombay that the FFC’s new funding policy first flowered. Kaul and Shahani, both products of the Pune Film Institute, perhaps represented the effect of Bombay’s first consistent exposure to “the Western art-film and West-oriented training.” The second wave petered out due to the FFC’s policy of “having asked its blue eyed boys to make the most off-beat films” that it then “applauded” in public and pressured the same “boys” in private to have its money returned. The third occurred in south India in the 1970s. Individual state subsidies in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Karnataka attracted talents from out of state that resulted in Mrinal Sen’s Telugu feature, Oka Oori Katha (The Outsiders, 1977). Within

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each state were new directors such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Karnad, M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Pattabhi Rama Reddy, and Girish Kasaravalli, who came from the worlds of journalism, theater, the Film Institute, and even commercial cinema.60 Filmmaker, screenwriter, and theater personality K. A. Abbas (1914–1987) made a distinction between the “new ‘New wave’ ” films and an earlier moment that came some twenty-five years ago that included his own Dharti Ke Lal (1946), Neecha Nagar (Chetan Anand, 1946), Kalpana (Uday Shankar, 1948), Gopinath (Mahesh Kaul, 1948) and Daaera (Kamal Amrohi, 1953). “These pictures (and a few more like them) were probably ahead of their times. But none of us actually thought that we belonged to a ‘New wave’; . . . we thought that we were fighting against the then current “new wave” of musical melodramas and inane comedies like Khazanchi (Treasurer, Motilal Gidwani, 1941) and Khidkee (The Window, Pyarelal Santoshi 1948).”61 What distinguished the “new ‘New wave,’ ” in his opinion, was “a concerted and conscious revolt . . . against the current formulas and an urge to break new and experimental ground” both with regard to content and style. Trained as several of them were at the Film Institute in Pune, and coming of age having watched in film society screenings the works of continental directors such as Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Bresson, and Resnais, the younger lot had come to be collectively labeled “New Wave.” The Film Institute and FFC were in large measure responsible for transforming something that at an earlier time would have passed as “isolated, spasmodic” or even “suicidal” attempts to swim against the tide. Abbas asserted that his own generation would have been “less alienated and frustrated” and far more successful in communicating with the audience had their training in cinema been a little more comprehensive to include both Hollywood cinema from the 1930s as well as works by significant Indian directors such as “Debaki Bose, Barua, Nitin Bose, Shantaram, Vinayak, Mehboob, Mahesh Kaul, Chetan Anand, and others who came before (and even after) the world became aware of the eminence of Satyajit Ray.”62 The “New wave,” concluded Abbas, “is valid because it is iconoclastic.” It helped bypass certain “gods and goddesses” (implying the star system) or the “great golden calf of the box office.” But once the “false gods” were toppled who/what would be put in their place? It would be detrimental to replace stars with a different kind of egotistical artist who paraded “the equally false doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ . . . under the guise of ‘Subjective Self-Expression’ and ‘a Personal Cinema.’ ”63 Critical studies and histories of Indian cinema so far have reproduced the cleavages documented above. Broadly, they go one of two ways. In one view, espoused by critics, journalists, and scholars such as Chidananda Dasgupta, Iqbal Masud, Aruna Vasudev, and Satish Bahadur, new cinema’s antecedents dated back to Ray and the success of Pather Panchali. In these accounts, Ray’s success galvanized an otherwise placid government of India to implement some of

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the recommendations of the 1951 Film Inquiry Committee that led to the establishment of the Film Finance Corporation in 1960, the Film Institute in Poona in 1964, and the hosting of international film festivals in the country. These initiatives were crucial in producing the talent that went into the making of new cinema. Whilst regarding Ray as the “father figure of the counterforce against the commercial cinema in India,” none of the aforementioned writers seriously probed the fact that Ray’s filmmaking had transformed since his Apu trilogy days. The films he directed during the period 1969–76, the heyday of the Indian new cinema, bore many characteristics that diverged radically from his early works. Dasgupta gestured toward this lack of attention when he wrote that Ray’s works from this period were not fully understood by the wider audience as well as “younger filmmakers and film buffs.”64 From the late sixties, many viewers found in Ray’s films a quality of “remoteness from the burning issues which caused first, a turn to Ritwik Ghatak and then, to a lesser extent, to Mrinal Sen, for a more forthright anti-establishment focus.”65 “The time may come,” he predicted, “when these films will be re-viewed in tranquility and rediscovered.”66 The other narrative, emerging out of mid-1980s film studies scholarship, especially in the influential Journal of Arts and Ideas, staunchly distanced the new wave phenomenon from Satyajit Ray. Cinema scholars Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha ranked Ghatak as the more radical of the two artists with  the implication that radicalism in film art was the hallmark of an authentic Indian artist. Refusing a genealogy of new cinema that began with Ray, Rajadhyaksha argued that the “New Indian Cinema . . . is effectively chronicled . . . as having begun either with Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969), a Tati-esque comedy (and commercial success) involving a tyrannical Bengali bureaucrat and a Gujarati belle with whom he goes duck-shooting, or Mani Kaul’s intensely formalist black and white experiment Uski Roti (Our Daily Bread, 1969).”67 Madhava Prasad, in broad agreement with Rajadhyaksha, made a distinction between the different strands of new cinema: a cinema with a “developmental” and statist agenda (Shyam Benegal’s films), a “middle class” cinema (Basu Chatterjee, Basu Bhattacharya), regional cinemas of Kerala and Karnataka (Pattabhi Rama Reddy, Girish Karnad, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, etc.), and the avant-garde (Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani). In Prasad’s fine analysis, new cinema’s demise occurred when the energies of the developmentalist and middle-class films were absorbed by the mainstream film industry. Ira Bhaskar includes in the Indian new wave both “high priests of an avant-garde experimental cinema emblematically represented by Kaul and Shahani,” and also the more realist filmmakers, namely Mrinal Sen, Awtar Kaul, Shyam Benegal, M. S. Sathyu, and others.68 Distinct from the above viewpoints is Aparna Frank’s insightful study of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani. Frank distances the two filmmakers from a

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“superficially classed” group of “new wave filmmakers.” Whilst noting that “most historians of new wave cinema acknowledge the limitations of the phrase new wave,” which “belongs to the realm of journalism as opposed to historiography,” she places Kaul and Shahani in the history of aesthetic modernism in India whose counterparts are to be found in painting and documentary, in artists such as Akbar Padamsee, M. F. Hussain, S. N. S. Sastry, Pramod Pati, and others.69 Frank also takes issue with views that emphasize the role of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in the history of the new cinema. Its loans did provide the economic underpinnings of that cinema, but “it should by no means be considered adequately supportive of the heterogeneous aesthetic experiments that burgeoned throughout the nation at that time.” The FFC intervention, for Frank, “was similar to Alexander Kluge’s characterization of the success of the New German Cinema as not because of the West German funding system, but in spite of it.”70 Kaul and Shahani’s cinema “truly embodied” a “post-colonial identity” that she defines as the gesture of a “belated avant-garde to assert its freedom from ideological impositions by way of expressing its freedom to engage with film as an art, and an art that can develop by being receptive to the west.”71 As should be clear from this rapid survey, even after five decades the New Indian Cinema generates strong opinions among film scholars. Instead of putting a lid on the debate, let me close this section by giving the last word to Satyajit Ray. Ray returned to the question of new cinema in 1980 with an essay entitled “The New Cinema and I.” The opening lines of the essay signal a shift in Ray’s position. “With the emergence of a crop of gifted filmmakers in the country in the last eight years, it is certainly legitimate now to talk of a new Indian cinema. What sets these filmmakers apart from the commercial ‘All India’ ones is a preoccupation with serious, rooted subjects which are put across with an imaginative use of modest resources.” Many filmmakers are named in the essay: Pattabhi Rama Reddy, Girish Karnad, M. T. Vasudevan Nair, B. V. Karanth, Girish Kasaravalli, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, all filmmakers from the southern Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala; Saeed Mirza, Govind Nihalani, Muzaffar Ali, and Sai Paranjpye from Bombay; and Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Biplab Roy Chowdhury from Bengal. About their films, he had this to say: “It is necessary to point out that none of these films are new in the sense of being innovative in the use of narrative methods, as Mani Kaul’s films are. This may be a good thing in view of the kind of public we have to contend with.”72 Having granted that Kaul was an innovator of method, Ray offers a justification for the absence of such work in the new cinema, “a trend that is marked by an overt preoccupation with idiom and form rather than with content may have problems of communication, and therefore of survival.”73 The newness of the new cinema, in other words, had less to do with formal innovation, and more with thematic novelty, which was presented as a necessity of the Indian film scene.

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The claim about the absence of formal innovation is undercut when Ray turns about halfway through the essay to his own work. “I fully believed that I was making something new, even innovative, for India when I made Pather Panchali.”74 Not even Bimal Roy, “a fine technician with a surer grasp of narrative than most directors,” broke new ground. And then again, My main preoccupation as a filmmaker . . . has been to find out ways of investing a story with organic cohesion, and filling it with detailed and truthful observation of human behavior and relationships in a given milieu and a given set of events, avoiding stereotypes and stock situations, and sustaining interest visually, aurally, and emotionally by a judicious use of the human and technical resources at one’s disposal. . . . My best achievements as a filmmaker lie within this field of pursuit. I am aware that they are not of a kind that hits one in the solar plexus, which is why they may well have been missed by many critics and most filmgoers here.75

Despite his phenomenal success and recognition, both at home and abroad, Ray was evidently anxious about his own place and legacy in the history of Indian cinema. While this may explain some of his criticism of the new cinema brigade, it still leaves us with the problem with which we started—how do we grasp the newness of the new cinema?

The Film Finance Corporation Without reducing the heterogeneity of the new cinema to the efforts of a single institution or individual, there is no gainsaying that the FFC, established in 1960, played an important, if controversial, role in the birth of the new cinema, especially during the tenure of its charismatic chairman, B. K. Karanjia. There were three distinct phases in the FFC’s brief lifespan. The first phase, from 1960–68, passed without much incident, as the corporation funded films in a haphazard manner with no clear sense of a mandate. The second, most crucial phase, lasted from 1968–76, for reasons we shall see below. The last phase, 1976–80, ended with the FFC and Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation merging to form the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), that exists to this day. The FFC was registered as a company on March 25, 1960, under the Indian Companies Act, 1956. Initially placed under the Ministry of Finance, it was shifted to the charge of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1964. The appointment of B. K. Karanjia, the editor of the well-known magazine Filmfare (and later Screen), as the chairman of the FFC in 1968, was a turning point in the story of new cinema. During that time, the “objectives and obligations” of the corporation were as follows:

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(i) to promote and assist film industry by providing, affording or procuring finance, financial or other facilities for the production of films of good standard and quality with a view to raising standards of films produced; (ii) to develop the film in India into “an effective instrument for the promotion of national culture, education, and healthy entertainment” and this is to be achieved by granting loans for modest but off-beat films of talented and promising people in the field.76

The memo clarified that “since the role of the Corporation” was more “promotional” than “commercial,” due consideration was to be given to “making films of artistic merit.” Another of the corporation’s mandates, one that was not fulfilled in any appreciable manner, was to “extend” its activities to sectors of “exhibition and distribution” of its own films as well as “acquire theatres on lease in the four metropolitan cities.”77

2.1 Film Finance Corporation publicity material, including new logo in the upper right

corner, undated. The four spools of the logo “represent financing, importing, distributing and exhibiting of films that are realistic, possess artistic merit, and combine social purpose with healthy entertainment.”

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The FFC had not always been committed to the aforementioned goals. In 1957, an interdepartmental committee prepared a report that advised “loans should not be given to persons who had no previous experience as producers or directors.” This changed in 1960 when the FFC was established. It was ruled then that “The Corporation (FFC) might also, in special cases, finance producers (i.e. filmmakers) who had not produced any picture in the past provided, looking to their technical and other qualifications, the Board of Directors was satisfied that the producer was likely to produce even as a first venture, a good quality film which would also be commercially successful.”78 A chaotic picture emerges during the first eight years of the FFC’s existence. During these years, writes Aruna Vasudev, the FFC was “swimming in unfamiliar waters in stressing ‘human interest,’ ‘Indianness,’ ‘identifiable characters in socially conscious stories.’ ” In 1963, it denied a loan to Ritwik Ghatak, who wanted to make a film based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aranyak, because he could not find a guarantor.79 Anil Dharker, a film columnist and writer, recalls that the “roll-call” of people who were given loans by the FFC in 1960–68 included V. Shantaram, Mohan Saigal, S. Mukherjee, Gajanan Jagirdar, Raman B. Desai, and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. “Although three films of Satyajit Ray (Charulata, Nayak, and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne) were also financed in this first phase,” the overall list of films did not “show any emphasis on art, discovery of new talent or any sense of adventure in finding a new form for the medium.”80 There is consensus in the literature that the first phase of the FFC was a failure because there was confusion about whether it was a “straight financial institution” or a “development body.” “If it was a financial institution, why was it giving loans for Satyajit Ray’s films which, in banking terms, were not an iron-clad security. If it was a developmental body, why did it back only tried and trusted filmmakers, many of them for films whose obvious eye on the cash register was not redeemed by even a stray glimpse of creativity?”81 Karanjia’s appointment and the loan given to Mrinal Sen for Bhuvan Shome are repeatedly cited in both governmental and trade reports as the decisive moment in the birth of a new wave in Indian cinema. Karanjia is said to have pulled the corporation out of the dire financial straits into which it had fallen due to its haphazard financing policies. With a board comprising S. Nagorwala (the secretary of the union finance ministry), Hrishikesh Mukherjee (filmmaker), Chidananda Dasgupta (critic, film society activist, and director), and Harish Khanna (a representative from the ministry of information and broadcasting), Karanjia initiated policies to give the “FFC a second chance.”82 This entailed “the crucial decision to finance low budget films, preferably but not necessarily in black and white,” a move that was greeted with the remark that in “the days of the aeroplane, Mr. Karanjia is taking the film industry back to the age of the bullock cart.”83 For Karanjia, this was the only way in which a “newcomer”

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turned away by “conventional” sources of funding could beat the star system and move forward with their endeavors.84 He also used financing and his editorial position in Filmfare as a check on plagiarism. Indiscriminate copying of Hollywood films, in Karanjia’s mind, was the reason “Indian cinema had . . . ceased to be Indian.”85 The FFC “formula” devised by Karanjia was “low-budget films, talented new film-makers, Indian stories.” Karanjia states that once they were implemented, these policies resulted in the discovery of several new filmmakers who “constituted the New Wave in Indian cinema”—Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Awtar Kaul, Basu Chatterjee, M. S. Sathyu; “new technicians” like K. K. Mahajan and A. K. Bir; and new authors like Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, Nirmal Verma, Ramesh Bakshi, Rajendra Yadav, and Jainendra Jain, thus introducing this rich body of literature to Indian films.86 Karanjia’s autobiography lists several achievements of the new wave with the disclaimer that these films remained confined to a minority audience. During his tenure as chairman, twenty-one awards, national and international, went to FFC-funded films. Exorbitant land prices in Indian cities such as Bombay, steep entertainment tax, and a failure to build art house theaters ensured that the new cinema failed to secure “a fair chance at the box office.” On balance, however, the distinction of new cinema outstripped these shortcomings. In new cinema, “the theme is the star, and the star is the theme.”87 Karanjia’s examples illustrate the coming together of a modernist literature with cinema.88 But he too privileged novelty of content over form. Themes that the new cinema opened up for audiences included the challenges of urban housing (Dastak and Badnam Basti); generational and class conflict (Sankalp, Maya Darpan, and Ek Adhuri Kahani); intimacy and arranged marriage (Sara Akash); and small town lives and communal strife (Sara Akash, Garam Hawa). He singled out new cinema’s varied treatment of love in ways that subverted popular cinema’s “conjugation” of the hero and heroine, to use Sangita Gopal’s description of Bollywood on-screen romance. Romantic love was rendered more complex as it was coupled with other issues: disability (Trisandhya, 1972), filial bonds (Phir Bhi, 1971), sexuality (Maya Darpan, 1972; Garam Hawa, 1974; Ankur, 1974; Nishant, 1975; Bhumika, 1977). “A new earnestness was evident in these filmmakers,” wrote Karanjia, as “their work held out the promise of the kind of personal, perceptive, provocative and socially committed cinema we had admired in European films ever since the first international film festival in India. Low cost and therefore low risk, these films could afford to experiment and their makers to proliferate.”89 It is questionable if Karanjia’s description of the FFC-funded-films as low cost, and therefore low risk, is accurate. Scholars like Aparna Frank have good reason to be skeptical of the institution’s generosity. Reports indicate that the funds advanced to the corporation by the government of India were “drying up.” As far as the government and the parliament were concerned, the FFC was a financial institution that gave loans that had to be recovered with interest. Anil

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Dharker wrote that “parliament expects FFC to take defaulting producers to court for non-payment; the filmmakers feel their film is the repayment.”90 This was a matter of considerable controversy with some contemporaries such as Satyajit Ray leaning in favor of the policy of trying to recover loans while others like Sen, Kaul, and others protesting against it as draconian. To increase its financial solvency, it was decided in 1974 that the corporation would import films, mainly non-Hollywood foreign films. This decision to step into distribution was seen as far-reaching by many. To cite Dharker once again, “Had FFC started distributing its films earlier, had it started leasing cinema theaters earlier, financing their construction some years ago, then the New Cinema Movement would have been much stronger today. But these are imponderables, and every movement takes its own time and develops at its own pace.”91 As it happened, Karanjia’s tenure at the FFC lasted seven years. The circumstances of his resignation, following a lengthy altercation with the minister of information and broadcasting, V. C. Shukla, during the Emergency, are detailed in his autobiography. More than anything, they highlight the precarious financial footing of the FFC, and thus of the new cinema. Accounts of the last phase of the corporation from 1976 until it became the NFDC under the leadership of Dr. Jagdish Parikh highlight that financial challenges loomed larger than anything else in the new cinema ecology. The FFC’s role was not to “give loans or a subsidy,” according to Parikh. As he noted in an interview, the FFC waived the requirement of collateral security if: “1. The Script Committee unanimously recommends a script of unusually high merit; 2. If the filmmaker makes the film in 16mm which while it significantly reduces costs and risks, also helps develop the 16 mm movement . . . 3. Loans are advanced against the guarantee of State Development Corporations (e.g., the Orissa Film Development Corporation) or any party with adequate means.”92 Parikh did not want to saddle filmmakers with the responsibility of distributing and exhibiting a film. But as a policymaker, he also acknowledged the dangers of extending loans without a “market superstructure” for products. The appendices of a 1976 report of the FFC contain lists of films whose loans were either written off, or were still pending repayment. Perusing them makes it clear that many films associated with the new cinema did not break even.93 That the FFC continued to fund films despite these commercial failures makes it unfair to allege that the new cinema succeeded “in spite” of its backing. This is by no means to suggest that the films were mouthpieces for the government. But government funding alone was not a sufficient condition to qualify a film as part of the new cinema phenomenon. Shyam Benegal’s Ankur was an important instance of a new, private, financial model that not many new cinema filmmakers could mobilize successfully. Government support for new waves is not without precedent in film history as evidenced by several European new waves. Even before the FFC, there were

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instances of such support in India, albeit in a disorganized and sporadic fashion—recall the government of West Bengal’s financial assistance in the completion of Pather Panchali. Other states such as Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa also stepped into subsidizing projects that were either shot on location or in official state languages. It is possible that these instances of support prompted Chidananda Dasgupta’s claim that “in hardly any country in the world has the government acted as midwife to the birth of talented filmmakers as it has in India.”94 Dasgupta overstates. In France, the Andre Malraux’s ministry’s “development fund” for young filmmakers neatly dovetailed with the rise of the French new wave. Nor did the federal or state governments in India, like their French counterparts, ever envision creating a fund whereby entertainment taxes could be channeled toward support for young filmmakers.95 Funding therefore must be supplemented with other features in the analysis of Indian new cinema’s history. A crucial consideration of the newness of the Indian new cinema is its alliance with literature, a feature hitherto unremarked in the scholarship.

Cinema and Literature Karanjia’s complaint upon taking over as the Chairman of the FFC was that the “Indian cinema appeared to be completely divorced from life as we live it. . . . one . . . obvious way, of bringing reality back into films was to film literary works of repute.”96 Modern international cinema, he acknowledged, was moving away from literature but “we will come to that stage later.” That literature was a major source of Indian films from the silent period onward has been documented by Kaushik Bhaumik and Sharmistha Gooptu. Mukul Kesavan has written about the role of Urdu in producing an “Islamicate” literary idiom in Hindi cinema. A huge number of films, mainly of the “social” genre, but also a handful of action and stunt films, had literary origins.97 By and large, the tendency was to opt for well-established authors. Ray, who wrote on the specific relationship between Bengali films and Bengali literature, commented on the poor “pallor of the adaptations.” Even when talented writers like Premendra Mitra (1904– 1988) or Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay (1901–1976) became directors, they “appeared to share the common belief that cinema was a popular medium which debarred seriousness of approach.”98 Thus, it was not their best stories that were adapted but weaker ones with predictable plots. Questions of adaptation between literature and cinema as well as writers’ attitudes toward experimentation and formalism were very much a part of the new cinema discourse. Until then, only well-known filmmakers like Ray or writers and cinephiles like Nirad Chaudhuri and Ashok Rudra had been known to engage in passionate and lengthy polemics around questions of adaptation.

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It was relatively rare to find authors engaged in questions of cinema. The new cinema changed that. A large number of the new cinema films were based on works by new authors. Proceedings from a seminar organized alongside a FFC sponsored film festival in New Delhi in 1973 offers a detailed account of the newly forged cinema-literature relationship.99 Mohan Rakesh, the author of Uski Roti, who passed away shortly before the  meeting, organized the seminar. Three distinct positions on the new cinema are discernible from the account. One group that included Shrikant Verma drew a distinction between the “new cinema” and Bombay cinema. He warned that the new cinema filmmakers should avoid the error of the authors of nayi kahani, who presumed that culture and literature were “the privilege of a few, an ideology based on a kind of class distinction.” He argued that there could be such a thing as an elitist literature but not an elitist cinema. “It did not matter if a film could be appreciated by only a small number of viewers. . . . the point was, does a given film ‘reach’ at least a minority?. . . What existed between such films and the viewers was not a ‘sensibility gap’ but a ‘communication gap.’ ”100 Verma was of the opinion that there was a distinctly Indian philosophy rooted in concepts of Indian “tradition and heritage” whose foundational principles were ideas of “infinity” and “immortality.”101 Filmmakers who based their works on other philosophical ideas, such as existentialism, were imposing a foreign mindset upon Indian audiences. Verma argued that Indian cinema should reflect ideas that were rooted in the Indian soil in the same way that French or Italian filmmakers referred to European philosophical currents in their works. Finally, a writer “should leave the scene,” allowing the filmmaker complete freedom with adaptation. Ramesh Bakshi, author of 27 Down (Awtar Kaul, 1974) differed from Verma in that he felt that there should be a collaborative relationship between writer and filmmaker. He cautioned that the FFC should not assess its funding policy in terms of “flops and hits” but that it should acknowledge that not all the films “had slow-paced tales for a narrative.” The latter could be accomplished by commissioning projects based on a variety of genres: science fiction, historical novels, and so on.102 Lakshmi Narayan Lal struck a different note when he remarked that the new cinema was so abstruse that it would drive audiences back to “Bombay glossies.” Rajendra Yadav, author of Sara Akash, concurred. “Simple stories simply told” was the need of the hour rather than the “intellectual bullying” of the “new filmmakers.”103 Devendra Mohan, Radheshyam Yadav, and Balraj Menra were more extreme. They denounced the purported newness of new cinema and decried the new filmmakers as “sensationalists,” “herds of cattle from Poona (meaning the Film Institute),” who were “raiding” and “blackmailing” the FFC for “sponsorship,” and the phenomenon as “a new Bombay formula” and a “fraud.” Manhar Chauhan demanded that a ban of five years be placed on further adaptations of works by authors whose stories had already been filmed.104

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A minority of those present, Chandragupta Vidyalankar and Nirmal Verma among them, appeared not to be bothered by the question of numbers. The former argued “there can be a beautiful film capable of being appreciated by only 10 spectators.” Verma, a pioneer of the nayi kahani movement in Hindi literature and author of Maya Darpan, asked for greater clarity in the FFC’s approach to funding. He also warned against false binaries, such as that between “realism and formalism” as well as too much emphasis on “communicability.” “It will perhaps be a long time before the innovations in modes of expression attempted in films like Maya Darpan are appreciated for their significance.” But that should not be a reason to penalize their makers. Other participants at the conference sounded a more partisan note when it came to judging the importance of the writer and the filmmaker in new cinema. Arul Kaul, author of the new cinema manifesto mentioned above, credited the “young and angry filmmakers as the principal force behind the ‘new cinema’ movement.” The new filmmaker’s “dwindling interest” in “mere storytelling” was reaction to the “oversimplification” of popular cinema.105 Bikram Singh, the film journalist who covered the seminar, concluded that the “conflict between the ‘new’ and the ‘old,’ in cinema as in the other arts” was too “complex” and “deep-rooted” to be resolved easily. Singh was right. Questions about the purported newness of disciplines and arts have a long history in India, starting perhaps with the navya (new) intellectuals in seventeenth century India that Sheldon Pollock and others have written about.106 Or maybe it goes even further back to taza gui, the idiom of freshness in Indo-Persian poetry. Closer to our time, there were the authors of nayi kahani in Hindi, naye afsane in Urdu, navya literature in Kannada, ciṟukkutai short stories in Tamil, the Hungry generation poets in Bangla, and those associated with journals such as Parichay and Natun Sahitya, the last literally meaning new literature, in the 1950s to the 1970s, who regarded themselves as a literary avant-garde. Crucial to their conceptions of newness was also a revolt against the older generation. The “new” writers rebelled against what they perceived as streaks of “romantic mysticism and ardent nationalism” of previous generations. In Bengali, this was epitomized by the “Tagore syndrome.” As the critic Amiya Dev observed, “what mattered immediately was how to come to terms with Rabindranath [Tagore] and not be overwhelmed by his pervasive presence . . . Bengali Modernism was not Western Modernism in Bengali dress; it was Bengali writing after Rabindranath in Modern dress.”107 Notwithstanding their criticisms that previous generations were too romantic, idealistic, and mystical, works by nayi kahani authors and artists did not entirely exclude these traits. A writers’ conference from 1957 showed that even as the concept of nayi kahani was accepted, there was no resolution to a number of conflicting and contradictory issues: whether it was rural or urban, a continuation or break with tradition, or depicted a static or dynamic reality. Nayi kahani fragmented further into movements for sacetan kahani (self-aware story)

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and samantar kahani (parallel story).108 Observers, however, continued to find linkages between the new and the old as evidenced in the following remark by author-critic Upendranath Ashk: “since Premchand’s days new stories have walked hand in hand with old ones with their new craft, style, and vision. I won’t be wrong if I say that the march still continues, and that the ‘new story’ is moving ahead not in a few directions but all over. A lot of writers are experimenting with this genre.”109 The field of new cinema was likewise split. If Sen, Kaul, and Shahani spoke of a complete break with the past, others like Benegal and Gopalakrishnan had no problems in explicitly acknowledging the influence in their work of forebears such as Ray. Benegal and Gopalakrishnan’s cinemas, like the former group, spoke of minority subjects—lower caste groups, women, the crisis of matriarchy, conflicts within leftist political formations. There was less of a preoccupation with the “changing grammar, expanding powers and soaring ambitions” of the film medium as elaborated in the New Cinema manifesto by Mrinal Sen and Arul Kaul in 1968. It wasn’t simply the case that Benegal or Gopalakrishnan chose new subjects for their films or privileged realist portrayal in their narrative. Both experimented, quite successfully, with new production methods. Gopalakrishnan helped establish the film cooperative Chitralekha that produced his first two films—Swayamvaram (One’s Own Choice, 1972) and Kodiyettam (Ascent, 1978)—and that had grown out of a film club he had cofounded. Benegal’s Ankur (The Seedling, 1974) was produced with funds from Blaze, the largest distributors of advertising films in India. He had made commercials for the company and we are told that Mohan Bijlani and Freni Varavia “were far-sighted producers who convinced him to make [Ankur] in Hindi and not in the regional language of Telugu, which was the director’s original plan.”110 The farmers of the Anand dairy cooperative in Gujarat produced (and featured in) Benegal’s Manthan (The Churning, 1976). Financing films through cooperatives occurred in a few other instances of new cinema— Ghashiram Kotwal (1978) was a product of Yukt, a collective consisting prominently of Mani Kaul, Satyadev Dubey, and Saeed Mirza, and Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother, John Abraham, 1986), of the Odessa collective. There was also the Joris Ivens collective started by filmmaker Gautam Ghose in 1974 to make political documentaries. In many respects, to limit the debate about newness to one between realism and modernism would land us in the impasse that D. N. Rodowick invoked in his important work, The Crisis of Political Modernism. Explaining the stalemate reached by the discourse of political modernism, Rodowick argued, “the most obvious reason is the starkness of the opposition between realism and modernism, which seemed to foreclose any interest in popular cinema as irredeemably compromised by the ‘dominant ideology’ in content and form.”111 Political modernism privileged discontinuity, materiality, and a decentered notion of subjectivity over psychological fullness, unity, closure, ideological illusion, and

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transparency. While there were instances in new literature and the new cinema in India that appear to be textbook illustrations of these protocols of political modernism, such as the works by Nirmal Verma and Mani Kaul, to invoke just two examples from each, there were many that were not. That does not, however, disqualify them as ideal candidates of the new Indian cinema. Nor was newness a matter of mimicking (film) movements of the past. Benedict Anderson observed the ubiquity among Europeans from the sixteenth century onward of naming places in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia with the prefix new—New London, Nova Lisboa, Nouvelle Orleans, and so on. It was as if the “new” existed in distant places with the “blessings” of the old.112 As a postcolonial film movement, the new Indian cinema was inarguably influenced by its European predecessors. The postcolonial always bears the ironic burden of belatedness and mimicry. Ashish Rajadhyaksha eloquently captures something of new cinema’s yearning to identify with European exemplars in a tribute to director Kundan Shah. Writing about Shah and others like him at the Film and Television Institute of India, Rajadhyaksha says, “You had the overweening ambition, to be up there with Antonioni, to remake Blow-up. And at the same time, no ambition: it was enough to show it to friends.” Shah’s favorite story, Rajadhyaksha tells us, was one of Fellini wanting to make a film about a clown who, balancing on a horse on a trapeze, cannot resist bowing to the audience even as he hurtles to his death. None of the new cinema films were made to a mass audience and none reached a mass audience: they did however reach a number that may well be many times more than that of the average mass audience: through people passing prints underground, through pirate networks, and eventually through digital means. . . . The cult-option was the only way these films could get past the dual stranglehold of state support that was often the kiss of death, and the impossibility of a commercial release. The only solution left, it appeared, was to make a film nobody could control.113

By way of concluding this discussion, let me turn now to a film that heralded the new cinema and that surpassed its maker’s expectations in terms of the level of success it garnered—Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome—to touch on what the aesthetic of newness felt like.

Bhuvan Shome Bhuvan Shome, writes Madhava Prasad, made “realism . . . a national political project.” Not the “humanist realism” of Satyajit Ray, with its “aura of individual artistic achievement” and accents of Henri-Cartier Bresson and Jean Renoir, but a radical realist practice that used the comic mode to critically comment

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on and even subvert realism.114 Prasad is not alone among Indian film theorists to regard realism as the chosen aesthetic mode of the developmental state. Sen’s radicalism inheres in crafting a film where the agenda of a modernizing, developing state, embodied in the persona of the bureaucrat protagonist, Bhuvan Shome, is brought into conversation with and eventually subdued to the needs of the people or nation. In Prasad’s analysis, Bhuvan Shome’s transformation remains the most radical element in Sen’s film. Following his encounter during a bird-shooting holiday with a charming village girl, Gauri, Shome thaws from an irascible, hidebound state functionary to someone tolerant of petty bribes as necessitated by the “realities of everyday life.”115 Interestingly, Ray, too, had focused on this theme of transformation, albeit in less complimentary terms. Recall his seven-word summary of the film: “Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed By Rustic Belle.” To focus on the transformation, while not wrong, misses out on the work of detail in the film. Bhuvan Shome, as its director once noted, was about mapping an open-ended journey of what happens to a person when he leaves familiar surroundings for utterly unknown settings.116 The film’s depiction of experiences that ensue during this encounter with the unknown contributed to the lasting freshness of Bhuvan Shome. It is to one of those moments in the film that I will focus below. But first some background. Bhuvan Shome was based on a story of the same name by Banaphool a.k.a. Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay (1899–1979). It appeared in the Bengali magazine Sachitra Bharat in 1956. Mrinal Sen read it and contacted the author, a medical doctor by profession, who spent most of his working career as a prabasi Bangali (emigrant Bengali) in the Hindi-speaking region of Bhagalpur in the state of Bihar, expressing his interest in making it into a film. It was difficult to secure a loan, with one financier agreeing to make an advance provided “Shomesaheb” was made younger so that “some kind of relationship with the girl was possible.”117 Finally, the FFC approved a loan based on a draft script of “seven or eight pages.”118 In an extended conversation about the film, Sen shared his thoughts on why it marked a break in Indian cinema. There is a humorous tone to the film—“inspired nonsense” is how Sen described it citing Jacques Tati—much of it accomplished through the use of animation, sound effects, freezes, mask shots, and a creative background score. The numerous freeze frames in Bhuvan Shome have a ludic effect, and are thus quite different from the use of this device at the end of Charulata (The Lonely Wife, Satyajit Ray, 1964), or in revolutionary films from Latin America such as Hour of the Furnaces (Getino and Solanas, 1968) or Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968). The use of animation too was novel in Indian cinema. Ram Mohan, an animation expert based in Bombay; K. K. Mahajan, a graduate of the Film Institute who became the film’s cinematographer; Sadhu Meher, who played the role of Gauri’s husband and also served as

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Sen’s production assistant; Vijay Raghav Rao, the music director then employed by the Films Division; and Suhasini Mulay were all new entrants into the world of professional Hindi cinema and their iconoclasm shone through the film. The film was also a Hindi debut for Utpal Dutt, a renowned theater and Bengali film actor who played the titular role. The humorous tone appears early in the film, when the protagonist is introduced through the voiceover of Amitabh Bachchan, another newcomer who would go on to become Indian cinema’s superstar.119 As it tells us that Shome is an honest and upright officer in the Indian railways, we see a succession of animated images of heaps of ill-arranged files, a pen signing them rapidly without pause, a set of swing doors with “Shri Bhuvan Shome” scrawled in uneven letters (as was usual with nameplates in government offices), and a telephone that rings incessantly. A different voice answers the telephone, interrupting the voiceover, with a “hello” that dissolves into an echo that in turn is reminiscent of the testing of microphones at political rallies, a staple of Bengali public life at the time.120 According to Parag Amladi, these innovations in Bhuvan Shome have to be seen in line with ongoing experiments in the documentary-making unit of the government of India, the Films Division. Documentary filmmakers like S. Sukhdev, Pramod Pati, K. S. Chari, S. N. S Sastry, and N. V. K. Murthy attempted to integrate “the formal approach of the Western experimental and independent cinema, as well as . . . the creative atmosphere of the National Film Board of Canada.”121 Sen himself contributed to a FD endeavor entitled Know Your Country. Bhuvan Shome, in Amladi’s reading, bore the stamp of an “institutional movement” that included the FFC and FD, especially the latter’s animation unit. It was replete with elements of developmental documentary and experiments with sound: “musique concrete, electronic manipulation of traditional music, and sound montages.” Sen’s use of animation was likely inspired by animation in FD documentaries that used it to “push through civic messages” about family planning, public safety, or the conservation of water and electricity. Finally, “the voiceover, so common to the traditional documentary, is used here in counterpoint, as just another character or ‘voice’ in the ensemble.”122 Amladi also saw Bhuvan Shome as replete with subtle references to Indian cinema, ranging from popular films such as Kshudhita Pashan (Hungry Stones, Tapan Sinha, 1960) and Junglee (Wild, Subodh Mukherjee, 1961) to Ray’s Charulata.123 Underlying the humor, the “profusion of madness,” is a complex take on the contemporary.124 Bhuvan Shome’s oddities are attributed to his being a Bengali. The late sixties were a period when critiques of the Bengali bhadralok (gentle folk, educated, salaried people) constituted a dominant strand of Bengali history and politics. Middle class Bengalis, of which Sen himself was a member, engaged in autocritiques that attributed the dismal plight of Bengali youth,

2.2 The animated office sequence, Bhuvan Shome.

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industrial backwardness, and widespread unemployment to the ingrained comprador characteristics of that class. Bengalis were seen as classic mimic men, subservient and fawning toward their British overlords. Yet this was the same class that produced a panoply of talent. Sen’s characterization of Bengali history and heritage in the early scenes that introduce Bhuvan Shome to the audience lays out this dense history in a highly condensed albeit whimsical fashion. A series of shots that last a little under two minutes unfold as the voiceover announces “Bangal,” “Sonar [Golden] Bangal . . . Mahan [Great] Bangal . . . Vichitra [Diverse] Bangal”—“Bangal” highlighting a non-Bengali speaker’s locution—melting into a melee of voices chanting the revolutionary slogan “inqilab zindabad” (long live the revolution), that in turn dissolves into complete silence, followed by another anonymous, angry, male voice threatening to go on strike if certain demands by cinema workers were not met. The images accompanying these sounds are stills of Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore followed by moving images of Satyajit Ray and Pandit Ravi Shankar. The parade of illustrious Bengalis dissolves into shots of processions, a police lathi charge, posters of Ho Chi Minh, an effigy of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, and Bengali women marching on the streets, ending with a shot of the film poster of An Evening in Paris (Shakti Samanta, 1967) featuring a scantily clad woman under which is tacked a list of demands by cinema employees. Bhuvan Shome is the bearer of this heritage and its myriad contradictions. Sen’s outlook on Bengali history sets him apart from contemporary artists and intellectuals who had grown impatient of the achievements of the bhadralok and emphasized only their shortcomings. The rest of the film is about the fate of an individual from this class when he finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings where he is the boss of no one, including himself. Let me now turn to a brief spell in the film that is at odds with the rest of its humorous narrative. Shome has something of an epiphany during this sequence that has a strange, dreamlike, fabulist quality. Interestingly, this sequence was Sen’s improvisation and is absent in Banaphool’s original story.125 Gauri dresses Shome up as a Western Indian villager—a short kurta, churidar, a big turban, and a stick—sufficiently scruffy so as to not alert the birds that there is a stranger in their midst. They will head over to the haunted (bhoot) bungalow, she tells him, a prime site to spot birds. We see the two figures, Gauri and Shome, in a long shot, running on a dazzling, empty expanse of rocky sand, his gun effortlessly perched on her shoulder. Shome quizzically inquires where she is taking him as there is a cut to a darker, shadowy, uneven terrain, with a ramshackle house in the background. Gauri and Shome appear in the foreground, their backs to us, as they make their way nimbly toward the building. We hear their excited voices against the sound of the wind blowing in the empty landscape. Once they are inside the building, the sound of the wind is

2.3 Scenes of protests in Calcutta, Bhuvan Shome. Above, Police lathi charge; below, protester.

2.4 Protests in Calcutta, Bhuvan Shome. Above, Effigy of President Johnson; below, women marching.

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punctuated by a musical birdcall. As the two enter a room, Shome asks Gauri about the place. “It used to belong to a king” she tells him, but is now an abandoned, haunted house. “Fantastic” mutters Shome, in English, completely transfixed by the strange beauty of his surroundings as Gauri launches into a tale she has heard from her father. The king came here to escape from the extreme heat of the land, she tells him. The house would never be hot as a cool breeze always wafted through its rich, tall, interiors. We catch a glimpse of a body of water in the background as the soundtrack switches to classical music. Gauri comes into focus again, this time framed against the window beyond which is the body of water. Pointing at two empty hooks on the ceiling, Gauri tells Shome that there used to be a swing that hung there on which sat the queen. This is the moment that is reminiscent of the swing sequences in Ray’s Charulata, except Gauri is not the immaculate Charu. She is dusty and bedraggled, as rural women used to manual labor are. In rapid shot reverse shot we see her through Shome’s eyes, as he imagines her as the queen. The soundtrack is now playing a song that commemorates the mythic figure of Radha on a swing with her female playmates. As dusk comes, the king joins his queen and regales her with stories—tales of foreign lands, of battle, and hunting—until she falls asleep. We don’t see Gauri’s face as she narrates this account to a rapt Shome; the lower quarter of her lehenga-clad body pacing up and down is visible in the frame, the mirrorwork on the garment twinkling in the sunlight pouring in through the latticed architecture of the walls. Suddenly she interrupts her narrative, and we see her face once again as she nimbly runs over to a verandah and points toward something on the horizon. As Shome trains his binoculars to where she is pointing, the background musical score changes into a medium paced instrumental melody, and we see the birds—a pat of flamingoes over which fly a wedge of swans. Shome and Gauri gaze eagerly, passing the binoculars between each other with a familiarity that is intimate. As most of the birds fly off, she suggests they run to a sand dune close by to keep looking. The magic spell of the four-minute-long sequence is broken, and we return to Shome’s hunting quest. Sen described the shooting of this sequence as something that was decided on location. The brother of the Raja of Bhavnagar, the place in Saurashtra in Gujarat where they were filming, told them about a spot where flamingoes came to feed around noon. They then flew off to a lake about four kilometers away. During filming, there were so many birds that Mahajan, the cinematographer, said, “I cannot see anything.”126 As for the house, Utpal Dutt sighted it when the film crew was making its way to the dunes. “A small house with a verandah. . . . The sea where the birds landed.” The housekeeper (chowkidar) narrated the story about the king and queen that Gauri told Shome. “This was exactly how I arranged the shots with Utpal and Suhasini.”127

2.5 Above, Shome and Gauri running into the haunted (bhoot) bungalow, Bhuvan

Shome; below, Gauri on an imaginary swing.

2.6 Above, Mirrors twinkling on Gauri’s lehenga, Bhuvan Shome; below, a rapt Bhuvan Shome.

2.7 Shome and Gauri sight the birds, Bhuvan Shome.

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A moment of perfect beauty so unsettles the obstinate bureaucrat that when he returns to his regular job, he makes an uncharacteristic judgment by rewarding a bribe-taking functionary—Gauri’s husband Jadav Patel. Images of his hunting holiday, Gauri’s face, and her laughter, flash in his mind when Shome decides to promote Patel instead of punishing him. But the tone of the last scenes is once again comedic. The moment in the bungalow was a brief respite in a comedy that often hit notes of sarcasm. When asked about Bhuvan Shome’s reception among European audiences as his “most erotic film,” Sen strenuously downplayed it. “Those [themes] were not my primary objective,” he noted. There was a complexity in Bhuvan Shome’s character and temperament and I tried to foreground that element. He was a widower and a moralist; he stared at women and yet, almost immediately averted his gaze. . . . In the bird hunting scene, when Suhasini puts her hand gently on Shome-saheb’s shoulder, he shivers and steals a glance at her. While we were shooting, Suhasini enquired about the relationship being just a father-daughter one. Was there perhaps more to it than that? I would like to say that this element was only superficial and had no bearing on the real issues which I tried to address in the film.128

Sen’s disclaimer of any trace of sexuality in the Shome-Gauri relationship might appear quaint and anachronistic against the backdrop of global radical politics in the 1960s. But it is not quaint when we analyze it through the lens of a strand of Indian nationalism—the Gandhian kind. As Ashis Nandy and Leela Gandhi have argued, “In a milieu where orthodox Indian nationalism was countering imperial allegations of ‘effeminacy’ through hysterical recuperation of a lost Indian ‘manhood,’ Gandhian ahimsa was predicated on a rigorous refusal of heteronormative masculinity, western or eastern.”129 Contrary to Ray’s complaints against censorship in India, both men were legatees of an ethic of sexuality that was premised upon an acknowledgment of eroticism, but a denial of sex. Bhuvan Shome’s “arrogant” and “lonely and sad” ways were irrevocably shaken by his erotic encounter with another India during the bird-hunting adventure, and Gauri was its catalyst.130 Where does this leave us with the question of novelty or newness of the “Indian new wave?” Let me offer a provisional response via Daniel Morgan’s recent discussion of Bazin as a realist avant-garde. In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” Bazin argued that by 1939—the year that two very significant films for Bazin, La Règle du Jeu and Stagecoach released—“cinema had arrived at what geographers call the equilibrium profile of a river.” That profile could be disturbed, however, if any “geological movement occurs.” Morgan speculates (with Bazin) on the factors that could lead to major stylistic change in cinema that were comparable to geological movements. It could be external events like the Second World War, whose aesthetic consequence was Italian

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neorealism. Or it could be new technology: new screen formats, other media, new lenses, cameras, and lighting. Finally, there was the impact of “individual films and filmmakers” that instigated fundamental changes in the medium by charting “new ways of showing a world on film.” Such a film or filmmaker could dig into “cinema’s chalk bed” and shift its directions.131 Bhuvan Shome effected a geological shift in Indian cinema. The erotic epiphany of the sequence I describe above in Bhuvan Shome is the engine of the film’s radical democratic possibilities. The trope of a city man cut loose of rigid urban regulation in the countryside, proximate with a beautiful, lively, young woman, is repeated enough in Indian cinema to confound judgment, as it did for Ray, about the film’s radical newness.132 Indeed, the question of newness is quintessentially postcolonial in that the postcolonial modern is often misrecognized as a copy—a poor and sly one at that—of the metropolitan modern that precedes it in time.133 Ray’s brutal seven-word denunciation of Bhuvan Shome resulted from a similar misrecognition of the modest, lowbudget, new Indian cinema. Ranjani Mazumdar and Arjun Appadurai have analyzed the phenomenon of repeat viewing in the context of popular Hindi films as a complex cultural enjoyment of déjà vu. Bhuvan Shome flips the sense of déjà vu to produce an entirely new experience out of something that at first glance seems utterly familiar.134 As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us through his reading of Gilles Deleuze in an essay entitled “Belatedness as Possibility,” newness enters the world through acts of displacement and disguise. It can confound judgment by making it difficult and challenging to distinguish the new from a “simulacrum, a fake that is neither a copy nor original.”135 The desire to explain it as that which we already know, and that which is habitual, is overwhelming. There was enough in Bhuvan Shome that make it possible for us to historicize the many stylistic and narrative elements in the film as I have done above. But historicism falls short when we analyze the moment of aesthetic opening I described in the haunted house scene. Echoing Sen, I would submit that we miss the film’s newness through “conventional viewing” in which the wish that a “bad man” will turn “good at the end” comes true. We also reduce it when we see it as a saga of a colonial-era bureaucrat embracing the postcolonial nation through his forgiving of petty infractions and the corruption of a subordinate. Bhuvan Shome is new because it is a challenge to political, moral, and aesthetic judgment. It resists ad infinitum a positive definition of newness while inciting the critic to always debate what is new in new cinema.

CHAPTER 3

DEBATING RADICAL CINEMA A History of the Film Society Movement

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n October  5, 1947, a small group of artists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and clerical workers gathered in Calcutta to establish a film society modeled on cine clubs in Paris in order to promote the exhibition and discussion of “good” cinema among cineastes in the city. Their aim was not only to emulate the Parisian clubs in their conversations about films. They also wanted to launch a journal that would feature well-researched articles on international cinema and contemporary Indian film culture. In the next decade, many more such film societies developed around India, with 6 of these (from Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Patna, and Roorkee) coming together in 1959 to propose the creation of a national regulatory body called the Federation of Film Societies, which was established later in the same year. By the 1960s, film societies had spread beyond metropolitan areas to small towns across India. According to a report published in the Indian Film Society News in 1981, from 6 in 1959 the number of film societies grew to 23 in 1964, 111 in 1971, 169 in 1978, and to 216 in 1981. By 1981, there were over a 100,000 film society members across the country.1 In what follows, I offer a brief history of the film society movement. It would be no exaggeration to say that in the absence of film societies there would have been no art cinema in India; nor would it have been possible to write its history. The pride that many film society activists took in themselves as film aficionados was reflected in their undying passion for publishing about film. The sources utilized in this chapter cover a wide range of publications by film societies. Many film society periodicals folded up after a few volumes, while others

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continued with varying degrees of success. I also draw on reports and surveys published by the Indian Federation of Film Societies, memoirs, and essays by film society members. These documents, in English and other Indian languages, housed variously in the National Film Archives in Pune and in the personal collections of long-time film society members, constitute a rich and hitherto unexplored archive of Indian cinema. Satyajit Ray was one of the founding members of the Calcutta Film Society (hereafter CFS). Later, he served as the president of the Federation of Film Societies in India, a post subsequently held by Shyam Benegal, who started his film society career in Hyderabad. Bansi Chandragupta and Subrata Mitra, who worked as art directors, were involved with the CFS. Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak were involved with film societies like Cine Central and the Cine Club of Calcutta. Other filmmakers, too, were pioneers of the film society movement: Basu Chatterjee cofounded Anandam in Bombay, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan cofounded Chitralekha in Trivandrum. P. K. Nair, the film archivist who helped build the collections of the National Film Archives in Pune, founded a film society called FILKA in Trivandrum. A number of film critics and latter-day film scholars emerged from the ranks of film societies. This is by no means an exhaustive catalog of the traffic between art cinema and film societies in India. The rest of the chapter delineates that relationship. This traffic, however, is not the only reason why a history of the film society movement is of interest to students of South Asia. The movement, particularly during the three decades or so when it flourished, came to be marked by debates about the cultural and political role of cinema that were reminiscent of controversies generated previously over literature and theater by the work of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA, founded in 1936), and the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA, founded in 1942). This connection between the concerns of film societies and those articulated by the IPTA or PWA were not accidental. Actors and directors like Utpal Dutt, Bijon Bhattacharya, Nemai Ghosh, and Ritwik Ghatak came into film societies after considerable involvement with the IPTA. Much more significant for our purposes than such individual associations, however, were the ideological overlaps between these earlier groups and the film society movement. Writing about the PWA, Priyamvada Gopal has argued that the “idea that a self-critical literature or, more precisely, writing that critically identified an ‘us’ and an ‘our’ in the interests of [social] reconstruction” was one of the defining features of the Progressive Writers’ movement.2 Similarly, as I demonstrate in what follows, film society activists struggled with the meaning of what constituted a “good” cinema. Was it something whose foremost commitment was to the uplift of the Indian people, a task in which, they argued, mainstream “commercial” cinema driven by profit motives had failed? Or was it, as an early film society activist put it, to “mirror the aspirations of common people” through the medium of film?3

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As such differences suggest, the film society initiative was not homogenous. Indeed, one aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the tensions and disputes inherent in that project. My second aim is to introduce the film society movement into discussions of postcolonial Indian history to show how civil society organizations related to films in the first three decades after independence.4 This movement’s contribution to debates about how to reorient cinema from a medium of mass entertainment into an art form for changing social and political consciousness remains undeniable, despite its elitist orientation, finite impact, and internal fissures. The diverse groups that comprised film societies were in agreement on one issue—their critique of mainstream Bombay (and other regional) cinema that they viewed as deluding the masses who flocked to theaters to watch a makebelieve world on the silver screen.5 This shared distaste aside, there was no uniformity in the views of the participants in the film society movement, either in their cinematic tastes or in their interpretations of the cultural tenets of the Indian left.6 To do justice to the rich heterogeneity of their views, I here draw attention to two distinct definitions of “good cinema” that emerged over the course of the film society movement. The period 1947–65 may be regarded as the first phase of the movement. During this time film society members were committed to cultivating and promoting good taste in cinema as their contribution to public life. This was fundamentally an aesthetic commitment to watch, understand, and eventually make good cinema in India. My analysis of this period focuses primarily on the institutional history of the movement: who started it and how it spread. Contrary to a long-held assumption that film societies flourished in Calcutta alone, a view no doubt fostered by the prominence of Ray, my account of the early phase demonstrates that Calcutta’s prominence in film society circles was matched in enthusiasm and activity by those in other cities and smaller towns across the country.7 I will also provide some details of the films watched by the early societies, both foreign films and domestic ones, and the difficulties involved in acquiring them. By the mid-sixties, however, we notice a shift from an emphasis on the aesthetic to a more political engagement with cinema. This was the era that scholars have studied under the rubric of “political modernism” in the Anglo-French context—a commitment to work out the relationship between film and ideology. Indian film society activists, too, evinced a desire to what D. N. Rodowick calls a “return to zero,” to make a complete break with the past and demystify films.8 The second half of this chapter focuses on the years 1965–80 to track this political turn and the ideological fault lines that developed within the movement as it expanded rapidly. The very fact that many film society activists in the 1960s reviled Ray as an aesthete signifies that good cinema was now being redefined as politically engaged cinema. This is also suggested by contemporary commentaries on the works of Sen, Benegal, or Ghatak. Film society

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activists of this later period debated the task of political cinema in a postcolonial society like India. While some supported the notion of a state-sponsored cinema, others remained critical of the radical potential of such a move. But they were all agreed that radical cinema should connect with the “Indian people,” an expression that featured time and again in their writings.

Early Years: The Search for the “Good” Film Despite the fact that most film society activists regard the CFS (1947) as the pioneer of such associations in India, there is evidence of at least two more film societies, both in Bombay, that were in existence before the one in Calcutta came into being. A questionnaire circulated by IFSON (Indian Film Society News) in 1964 to the earliest film societies around the country is a good starting point from which to map the history of the early years. The responses it elicited offer vivid glimpses into the challenges and experiences during the first fifteen years or so of the movement. One of the respondents to IFSON was the Bombay-based Amateur Cine Society of India, established in 1939. According to Deryck Jeffries, who signed off on the questionnaire on behalf of the society, it had been founded with six members by M. Jepson, who was associated with the English daily, the Times of India.9 Jeffries noted: “We are mainly interested in making amateur films—but like to see film classics for appreciation so that we can improve our own technique. We believe that you can’t make a good film unless you know what the ingredients of a good film are—ergo see good films, appreciate them, then try to emulate their example.”10 The second film society, also in Bombay, was the Bombay Film Society founded by Ferenc Borko, a Hungarian photographer serving in the Indian army. This society was registered in 1943 under the Societies Registration Act of Bombay. We are told by R. E. Hawkins, who used to be the general manager of the Oxford University Press, India, and who succeeded Borko as chairperson of that society, that a group of nine members would meet about once a month for film screenings at a miniature theater above the Eros cinema hall in south Bombay. Hawkins noted in his 1981 reminiscences that most of the early records of this film society were destroyed. A remaining extant note from one Rudi von Leyden dated June 8, 1946 stated that the first Indian film screened by the society was N. R. Acharya’s Uljhan (1942). In addition to watching film classics from abroad like In Which We Serve (1942), Citizen Kane (1941), Blithe Spirit (1945), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Jean Renoir’s The River (1951), the latter film shot in West Bengal, the Bombay Film Society also watched Indian films like Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (1946) soon after its release. The members of these two societies included important documentary filmmakers like Dr. P. V. Pathy, Paul Zils, V. M. Vijaykar, and Clement Baptista.11 There were similar attempts to promote film appreciation in

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other parts of the country, such as Calcutta. “Yet these societies,” remarked the film critic Chidananda Dasgupta, “were not able to do much more than getting together to see good films or making sporadically inspired attempts to create an infrastructure for the enhancement of film culture. There were too many obstacles in British India to the growth of stable institutions with wide interactions within the country and abroad.”12 To what extent the independence of India from British rule had a direct impact on the rise and growth of the film society movement remains unclear. But independence certainly increased governmental involvement in a general societal search for “good cinema” as seen earlier. A number of important government officials were involved in promoting the cause of cinema. Among them was Indira Gandhi, who acted as the vice president of the Federation of Film Societies for India, and in that capacity helped film societies in acquiring permission to exhibit to their members uncensored films imported from abroad.13 Readers will also recall the film inquiry committee under cabinet minister S. K. Patil, that made some important recommendations for the promotion of “good cinema” in the country. Eventually these recommendations led to the founding of such institutions as the Film Institute of India (1960, later renamed the Film and Television Institute), the Children’s Film Institute (1955), the National Film Archives of India (1964), as well as funding bodies such as the Film Finance Corporation. While these initiatives did create a favorable atmosphere for the growth of art cinema in India, they do not explain the impetus behind the film society movement. The latter was largely a product of an individual or groups’ cinephilia and their complete dedication to the cause of cinema. This is evident as we read reminiscences by film society activists in places like Calcutta, Delhi, or Patna. As mentioned above, a group consisting of Satyajit Ray, who was then an employee at the advertising firm Hindusthan Thompson Associates; Chidananda Dasgupta; documentary filmmaker Harisadhan Dasgupta, who had just returned from Hollywood; Hiran Sanyal, a literary personality; and Radhamohan Bhattacharya founded the Calcutta Film Society.14 Many of these early participants recall the numerous problems they encountered as they searched for a venue to convene their meetings. The threat of eviction from rental property—as most Bengali householders did not yet consider people associated with cinema socially respectable—is frequently mentioned. Ironically, most film society members were not directly involved with the film industry. But hostility toward the society was not only a by-product of social prejudice against cinema. Even proprietors of theaters remained skeptical of the endeavor. “We were . . . being subjected to a two-pronged attack,” wrote Satyajit Ray recalling the early days of the Calcutta Film Society. “One came from the film trade, which spread the word that a group of subversive youngsters was

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running down Bengali films at meetings and seminars.” The other came from the neighbors in a building where one of the members of the Calcutta Film Society had offered the group his living room to host meetings. The group was unceremoniously thrown out of the premises as the owner of the house felt that “film people” were “spoiling the sanctity of his house.”15 Ray and his colleagues in the Calcutta Film Society were not the only ones who faced such obstacles. Filmmaker and writer Vijaya Mulay, the founder of the Patna Film Society and subsequently of the Delhi Film Society, offers a similar anecdote. A general prejudice against films and widespread apathy about the diversity of film cultures played a role in the social censure that film societies faced. “Aap bioscope mein kaam karengi kya?” (Are you going to work in the bioscope?), Mulay was asked by her daughter’s friend Bacchi’s mother: Apparently my young daughter Munni . . . had told her friend Bacchi . . . about the meeting of a “bioscope company” in our house the previous evening and had described with a boast as to how Arun-mama (Arun Roy Choudhury, a journalist and a co-worker in the Patna Film Society) had promised to show her lovely films—or bioscopes—as they were called in Patna in those days. This was enough to stir the placidity of our neighbourhood . . . I tried to explain about the newly formed Patna Film Society, but I don’t believe I was quite able to explain to my neighbour why some of us took films seriously and wanted to see a better fare than what the local cinemas offered . . . A woman lecturer like me working in a film company was news! But not a film society!16

✳✳✳ What exactly did the film societies do? Here are two descriptions from a volume published to celebrate fifty years of the Federation of Film Societies in India. The first was written by Chidananda Dasgupta, who was associated with the Calcutta Film Society since its founding years. The second is a summary of the task of film societies, presumably written up by Narahari Rao, the editor of the said volume. In Dasgupta’s words, Film societies . . . by screening, discussing, reading, and writing about good cinema all over the world . . . create a higher level of artistic taste and thus build up a better and bigger audience for good films within the country. By stirring up interest in the creative cinema among cultured people, film societies (much more than even the training institutes) help to bring out new talent.17

Dasgupta’s remarks clearly exemplify that in the early years, the establishment of film societies was geared toward creating good taste in cinema. What constituted good taste? As we shall see, most film societies in India shared in the

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belief that Indian cinema made during the previous fifty years did not exhibit good taste. Dasgupta’s use of such words as “creative” cinema or “cultured” people indicates that film societies in the early years were fired with a sense of cultural superiority and aimed to create “value-distinctions,” in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, among different kinds of films. Their purpose was twofold: cultivation and dissemination of good taste through films. They would not encourage discussions of films in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, or Malayalam that were watched by thousands of Indians in theaters around the country. Such cinemas, they believed, produced the image of “a synthetic, non-existent society” that was credible “only within the norms of this make-believe world.”18 Theirs was instead a search for what they regarded as creative and realist cinema, very different from the products churned out by the Indian film industries. In an article published in the journal Indian Film Culture in 1965, Dasgupta observed that a proper appreciation for cinema came to India only as recently as the 1950s, a good half century after the medium was first introduced into the country. “In India,” he wrote, “the film was an importation from the West, a foreign body introduced into a system unprepared to absorb it. Technology had not made a real impact, and the need had not arisen for a distilling of art through science as it were.” This was followed with an even more trenchant judgment on Indian film luminaries as he remarked: “Put Dreyer alongside Phalke, or Eisenstein next to Barua, and the result is ludicrous.” For Dasgupta, it was not until the release of Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land, Bimal Roy, 1953) and Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, Satyajit Ray, 1955) that “a new understanding of the medium dawned on its creators.”19 These were no doubt expressions of prejudice against so-called popular cinema whose importance and depth have been studied at length by film scholars. But these statements help further our understanding of the milieu that fostered the early film society movement.20 A film society is a membership club where people can watch private screenings of films which would otherwise not be shown in mainstream cinemas. They are, in some places, known as Film Clubs and Cine Clubs, and they usually have an educational aim, introducing new audiences to different audiovisual works through an organized and prepared program of screenings. They are involved with people who love films.21

Thus wrote Narahari Rao of the pedagogical aims of the film society movement in the introduction to a volume commemorating its fifty-year anniversary. Similar sentiments were voiced by numerous film society founders from across the country. For example, Satyajit Ray noted that the Calcutta Film Society he helped found was symbolic of “shackling ourselves willingly to the task of disseminating film culture amongst the intelligentsia.”22 For the renowned

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director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, there were “two important reasons” for starting the Chitralekha film society in 1965. He said, “One, I wanted to continue watching the best of international movies. Two, I wanted to introduce audiences to a different kind of cinema. And tell them ‘Look, it is not the song-and-dance kind of cinema alone that is being produced. There are many other kinds of cinema being made in the world.’ ”23 Or take Muriel Wasi’s recollections about the twelve-or-so people who founded the Delhi Film Society in 1956: “These founding parents were professionals in other fields: educationists, journalists, businessmen, administrators, diplomats—but their common interest was the cinema and the special thing that cinema could do to criticize life.”24 She adds, “They screened films often twice a month and attendance was regular and complete. They met with sympathy, without noise or contention.”25 Vijaya Mulay’s recollections tell us about the kind of films that were routinely screened in theaters in the 1940s and 1950s. “The fare offered by the Patna cinemas,” wrote Mulay “was solid Hindi films with a few Bengali films thrown in now and then. All these came after a long run in Calcutta.”26 As for English films, Mulay reported that they were not popular anyway; cinema owners were forced to lower ticket prices by half. Apparently, it cost Mulay more to hire rickshaws to get to the cinema to watch these films than it did to buy tickets. In the limited range of English films shown in Patna, “action films such as Tarzan, Fu Manchu series, Beau Geste etc. would usually be the cinema owners’ preference.” Occasionally Patna theaters would screen films starring Mae West, Busby Berkeley, and Charlie Chaplin. The atmosphere of the theaters is best captured in Mulay’s own words. Audiences watched these films “amongst the whirring of fans, half open doors with light seeping in and with children whimpering or back-stage whispering in the back ground.”27 Film societies were an attempt to break away from this type of film-going. In their own view, it was a move away from treating cinema as entertainment toward seeing films as serious texts of life. The 1964 IFSON questionnaire compiled by Anil Srivastava, which discusses the kind of films the societies screened, allows us to see what early film societies meant by good cinema. The responses suggest that not all films were available to all film societies. Indeed, acquisition of “good” films was one challenge that is mentioned in all the journals, reminiscences, and reports that have survived from the early days of the movement. The film societies in the metropolitan cities, Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, and eventually in Madras (the latter was set up in 1957) were able to acquire and screen considerably more films than their counterparts in Roorkee, Patna, Ranchi, Kanpur, Agra, and Jodhpur. The former groups also had a better supply of film-related journals, magazines, and books in their libraries, although here too there are differences in the degree to which film societies prized access to written material. The CFS started its own journal, Chalachitra, in 1948, but failed to bring out more than one issue.

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Subsequently, when the number of film societies multiplied around the city, Calcutta became home to numerous film society periodicals like Kino, Chitrapat, Chitrakalpa, Chitrabikshan, and Chitrabhaash. In comparison, there were two journals that were published by the Anandam film society and Film Forum in Bombay called Montage and Close-Up, respectively.28 In 1964, the Calcutta Film Society had about three hundred film-related books in their collection and regularly subscribed to publications such as Sight and Sound, Monthly Film Bulletin, Film Polski, Soviet Film, Film Quarterly, Montage, Movie, and Indian Film Culture.29 They also hosted seminars by film-related personalities visiting from abroad like Jean Renoir, Marie Seton, James Quinn, and Jean Grémillon.30 While the other metropolitan film societies maintained a collection of books and journals and hosted a few seminars, the Calcutta-based film societies outstripped the rest in their academic approach to cinema. Nothing illustrates this better than the list of films the Calcutta Film Society screened in 1947–65. Though incomplete, the list included Battleship Potemkin, General Line, Ivan the Terrible, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Last Laugh, Metropolis, Le Million, The Italian Straw Hat, The Kid, Kanał, Ashes and Diamonds, The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, My Universities, Les Bas-fonds, Un carnet de bal, Citizen Kane, Long Voyage Home, Stagecoach, Senso, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, The Face, Ugetsu, Harp of Burma, Mon Oncle, Jour de fête, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Rififi, Le jour se lève, Le Courbeau, Zéro de conduite, L’Atalante, and He Who Must Die.31 Looking back, we might argue that the list, though more exhaustive than lists published by other societies, was not systematic. Its eclecticism suggests that members of the Calcutta Film Society were drawn to different currents of European (and some Japanese) cinema, particularly realist, neorealist, modernist films, and some film noir. The influence of the Soviet and other “eastern bloc” films is also clear from this list, which is not entirely surprising given the government of India’s sympathies with the socialist bloc and the visit to Calcutta of a Russian film delegation in 1951–52 that included filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin and actor Nikolai Cherkasov.32 According to Keya Ganguly, the Calcutta Film Society’s efforts to create a new “intelligentsia” educated in cinematic taste should be seen as “shifting the conversation about modern art and culture from its mooring in European thought and experience and re-anchoring it in nonWestern texts and realities.” To make this a project that would be “a substantive effort at raising consciousness rather than an empty gesture of nativist appropriation,” however, Ray and his colleagues first “had to educate the Calcutta literati in the various European and Soviet traditions of cinema.” She argues that this was their way to ensure that “an alternative tradition express its full force, though it had by no means to be merely parasitic.”33 The difficulties in film procurement and the generally precarious lives of the early film societies emerge as the two most important challenges facing the

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movement in these years. The Calcutta Film Society is again a good case in point. Despite being acknowledged as “a true film society of the early period,”34 even this leading association folded up within three years of its inception. One reason for this was Satyajit Ray’s departure for England in April 1950. But much more crucial was the absence of financial resources and low membership numbers.35 Ray himself observed that it was difficult to get more than twentyfive people to become members of the film society. His colleague Dasgupta noted in the first (and only) issue of Chalachitra that it was a challenge collecting dues from many people who were ostensibly interested in becoming members of the society.36 The membership dues in 1950 were eight rupees for three months. It took quite a few years to increase the number of members to a hundred.37 Ram Halder, the man instrumental in reviving the CFS, attributed the recruitment problem to another factor: the alleged snobbery of the leaders of the CFS, most notably Chidananda Dasgupta and Satyajit Ray.38 While Ray in later years softened his stand, many like Dasgupta were criticized in the 1960s for their reluctance to allow “ordinary people” into the ranks of film societies. Running a film society required a great deal of effort. Halder, for instance, makes special mention of the critical help extended by two individuals—Ratilal Dave, who was a film distributor, and Mahendra Gupta, the owner of a cinema hall—in reviving the Calcutta Film Society. Dave allowed the CFS to get films from his stock free of charge; Gupta let the society host screenings in his theater for a discounted rate of fifty rupees a month. Now to the question of acquiring films, the other hurdle faced by most societies. While a handful of members were able to attend film festivals abroad, this was not within the reach of the ordinary film society member. India hosted the first international film festival in 1952, and there are many accounts of the excitement produced by the screening of films like Rome Open City, and Bicycle Thieves. Recalling that experience, Ghatak wrote, “I am absolutely convinced of the tremendous impact the first International Film Festival had on all of us . . . countless films, a number of people, and a rare occasion for exchange of ideas! We could see excellent films which immediately provoked a long deferred seriousness towards cinema.”39 However, the journal Indian Film Culture noted with despair that the subsequent film festival of 1961 “had no such impact” while the committees announced for the 1965 festival contained names that filled film society members “with horror and foreboding.”40 In fact, the role of film societies—in film selection, awards, or jury constitution—in government-sponsored film festivals was limited at best, or almost absent. Outside of film festivals, quite infrequent in the 1950s and 1960s, film society members had to rely upon other sources to watch foreign films. A Madras film society brochure noted that “the main sources of films are the embassies . . . and the Central Film Library, New Delhi. The supply however is erratic and at

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times we have either no films or too many together.”41 Indeed, some early film societies folded up because of the difficulty in procuring an adequate number of films for exhibition to their members. As the Indian Documentary reported, “The Bombay Film Society has been unable to present its regular monthly showing to members for the past two months, due to obstacles and delays put before it by the Home department of the Bombay government. Difficulties of exhibition and censorship are one thing; equally discouraging is the difficulty of importing into India, in the first instance, films destined for non-commercial exhibition to small groups scattered throughout the country.”42 Throughout the 1950s, the government of India upheld the restrictions on distribution and exhibition imposed by the Indian Cinematograph Act of 1918. This meant that no “film society, university, school, museum, club, or business concern could show a film without submitting it for censorship.”43 In the early 1950s, film exhibitions on consular premises as well as footage from unfinished films owned by producers were exempt from censorship. Furthermore, unlike their British or American counterparts, Indian film societies had to pay entertainment taxes during the 1940s and 1950s.44 By the early 1960s, many of these “hurdles began to be lowered.”45 In 1962, any film recommended by the president of the Federation of Film Societies (Satyajit Ray) was exempted from censorship by the government of India and then exhibited to the member film societies. The federation was also allowed to import sixteen films free of customs duty for noncommercial screening among its members.46 By 1965, seventy feature films and a number of short films were brought to India either via direct import or through an exchange with UNESCO. In addition, foreign missions in India, “notably those of France, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, West Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, UK, Yugoslavia, USSR, and East Germany” also cooperated with individual film societies by giving them access to films from their respective countries.47 Nevertheless, the “flow of films from developing countries” was “poor despite the Federation’s best efforts . . . primarily due to the Federation’s financial position of not being able to purchase and import films; the concerned foreign missions not maintaining a film library; and the absence of regular film exchange programs between these countries and India.”48 In other words, scarcity, in the lack of archives and cultures of preservation, prevented the advance of a South-South nexus among postcolonial film cultures. In India, film societies in small towns suffered in particular. As Arun Kaul, one of the founders of the Bombay-based Film Forum put it, “it is a matter of some shame that small town societies which need greater help hardly ever get it. There are many films of “extraordinary merit” such as “the Swedish, French, New German and Japanese films” that never reached these smaller outfits. The federation, he argued, would be failing in its duties if the films it received were viewed only by a “few big city societies.”49

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Even nonmainstream Indian films were difficult to acquire for film societies in smaller cities. Anil Srivastava’s recollections serve as a useful reminder of the degree to which individual initiative mattered not only in forming a film society, but also in keeping it running. It also draws attention to what Abhija Ghosh describes as the “material” aspect of cinephilia: the film society activist’s physical engagement with “the celluloid aspect of cinema.”50 August 4, 1959, in a convent school on Idgah Hills in Bhopal, three children were running a broken-down film projector salvaged from a junk shop; a girl was winding the film on a spool free-running on a pencil; a boy was keeping a finger on the loop so that a torn sprocket may not cause the projector to chew up the film; and another boy was varying the rheostat to keep the speed of the projector as constant as humanly possible.51

This, noted Srivastava, was the beginning of the International Film Club in Bhopal. At the time, he was not aware that there already existed film societies in Calcutta, Delhi, and Bombay. He learned about the Apu trilogy, “responsible for putting India on the map of world cinema,” four years after the film had released in India.52 Ironically, Ray’s films, though world renowned, were not easily available in India, and Srivastava had to phone Ray to request a copy of Pather Panchali.

Reminiscences of an Early Film Society Activist Ram Halder’s reminiscences, Kathakata Kamalalaya O Prashanga Film Society (Kathakata Kamalalaya and the Subject of Film Societies, KK) offers a detailed portrait of the difficulties listed above. Halder, who ran a bookstore called Kamalalaya in Calcutta, was first associated with a group called the Bengal Film Society, after which he became a very active member of the Calcutta Film Society in 1950. In 1960, he left the latter due a difference of opinion with Dasgupta and joined the Cine Club of Calcutta. Halder’s reminiscences open with a statement of his strong reservation against Dasgupta’s predilection for admitting into the society only those people he considered film buffs. Apparently, even Dasgupta’s wife was denied membership on these grounds! He noted that in the early years Ray tacitly supported Dasgupta’s decision to play the gatekeeper to the “coterie.”53 Ray gradually relaxed his stance as it became increasingly clear that membership numbers were important for the sustenance of the society. Halder speculated that his own admission was allowed to ensure a smooth supply of film-related books that were not easily available or were beyond the means of most film society members. In lieu of his dues, he ordered several important books on cinema for CFS

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members, namely Eisenstein’s Film Sense, Film Form, Pudovkin’s Film Technique, Rene Clair’s Reflection on Cinema, Ernest Lindgren’s The Art of the Film, and the journal of the British Film institute, Sight and Sound.54 Halder suggested that in addition to watching the classics of world cinema, individual members also tried hard to promote the making of nonmainstream films in India. For example, after Ray wrote a screenplay for Ghare Baire (Home and the World), Harisadhan Dasgupta, his colleague in CFS, purchased the rights to the film. The project was shelved as they failed to find a producer.55 Ray then embarked upon the arduous endeavor of making Pather Panchali. Fellow film society colleagues made efforts to raise money once it became known that Ray had borrowed money against his own life insurance policy, sold his wife’s jewelry, and his own collection of books and records, and that all the actors had agreed to make the film without a fee. Eventually the government of West Bengal funded the making of Pather Panchali. Halder’s account abounds with examples of the friendships he forged not just within the CFS but also with other societies around the country. He made particular mention of the well-known film critics Amita Malik and Punen Ibrahim, both of whom were active in the Delhi film society; Arun Kaul, Nitin Sethi, and Basu Chatterjee, who worked hard to sustain the film society movement in Bombay; and Jagat Murari and Satish Bahadur who helped in founding the movement in Pune and started the Agra Film Society. These groups exchanged ideas on how to overcome bureaucratic red tape.56 Likewise, film society members referred each other to jobs. Ghatak’s appointment as vice principal and professor of Film Direction at the Poona Film Institute was the result of an intervention by Ray. Similarly, Halder himself was offered the position of archivist at the National Film Archives. He declined.57 But it was the difficulty in film acquisition that emerges as the single biggest challenge in Halder’s account of the early years of the movement. Individual beneficence and the hard labor of activists like Halder or Ray enabled the CFS and later the Cine Club of Calcutta to watch foreign films. Halder recalled that Marie Seton brought with her to India a selection of films including Que Viva Mexico (Sergei Eisenstein, 1932), Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957) and Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa, 1957). Octavio Paz, who was the Mexican ambassador, and of whose friendship Halder wrote about at some length, gave the Cine Club of Calcutta a copy of Nazarin (Luis Buñuel, 1959).58 Halder quoted from a letter he sent to John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador during 1961–63, when he, Ray, and a few others were trying to organize a retrospective of American cinema in Calcutta. “You are not the real ambassador of America,” he wrote with rhetorical flourish. “These ambassadors (referring to the chosen films) in tin cans do much more effective work for the cause of the States among the cineastes of India.”59 The attempt to host a series entitled

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“The Golden Age of Russian Cinema” in order to make film society members aware of the impact of 1920s–1930s Russian films fell through when the only film that could be acquired from the Russian consulate in Calcutta was Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1946 [released in 1958]). Particularly invaluable in these early days were special favors from institutions such as the United States Information Service (USIS) that made their auditorium, projector, and projectionist available for film screenings. Halder’s recollections demonstrate also how closely the film society movement in its first phase depended on the support of political leaders and wellplaced bureaucrats. The unsuccessful effort to host a Polish film retrospective in Calcutta serves as a good example. In order to raise money, the initial plan was to open it up to the public instead of restricting it to film society members. Accordingly, a few members of the Cine Club of Calcutta met with Jagannath Kolay, the minister of information and broadcasting for the government of West Bengal, in his office at the Writer’s Building. Atulya Ghosh, a senior Congress leader, wrote a letter to the cabinet secretary in New Delhi on behalf of the Cine Club of Calcutta so that the films could be exhibited to the public. Despite the intervention by this well-known senior Congress leader, the Congress government at the center denied permission because they were uncensored prints. These facts help us to understand why film societies invited prominent citizens of the city to be their presidents and vice presidents, even when these individuals knew next to nothing about world cinema. For example, in the early 1960s, the president of the Cine Club of Calcutta was an ex-chief justice of the Calcutta High Court, P. B. Chakrabarty, and the vice president was a professor of political science, Nirmal Bhattacharya. Halder reminisces: “as neither of them knew much about films we often took books to their houses. Afterwards we would meet in Mr. Chakrabarty’s chambers. Other members of the executive committee of the Cine Club joined in these discussions.” They included the well-known photographer Sunil Janah, the film writer Kironmoy Raha, Pramod Lahiri (who produced several of Ritwik Ghatak’s films), Professor Gurudas Bhattacharya, and Ratilal Dave.60 On another occasion, a Mr. Pulikan of the Alliance Française in Calcutta helped the Calcutta group acquire a print of Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) when the film was being shipped from Dhaka to Rangoon. Halder recalled that within two days of his conversation with Pulikan, the film was screened at the Janata cinema hall. Unfortunately, this particular screening unleashed a regime of police restriction on film societies following an inadvertent remark by the film critic of the Statesman in his review of the film that the copy exhibited was uncensored.61 Halder’s account remains valuable also for the light it sheds on the ways in which the author remembered the spread of film societies to small towns

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outside Calcutta as well as to other metropolitan centres.62 For example, he recalled the efforts of Basu Chatterjee (who became a renowned director of “middle-cinema” in India) and Nitin Sethi in reviving a fledgling film society in Bombay and renaming it as Anandam in the early 1960s.63 Enthusiasts wishing to start a film society in the small towns often requested guidance from those in metropolitan cities. Thus, Pramod Lahiri from the Cine Club of Calcutta helped in the formation of clubs in places like Dum Dum, Burnpur, and Barrackpore (all in the outskirts of Calcutta) in the 1960s. Halder himself went to districts further away, namely Midnapur, Darjeeling, and to Rourkela and Cuttack in Orissa. Each time, the members from Calcutta would bring a well-known film or series of films (usually classics in world cinema) for their counterparts in the districts. One might sum up the history of the film society movement in this first phase as follows: in spite of the unsystematic nature of the corpus they watched, what distinguished the film societies’ approach to cinema from cinema as entertainment accords with David Bordwell’s distinction between film studies as an academic discipline and the “more common ways of talking and thinking about films.”64 Film society activists did not describe themselves either as fans or as academics. However, analyzing their activities, meetings, and discussions offers strong grounds for arguing that they occupied a space akin to both these groups. Long before the birth of film studies as an academic discipline in India, film societies approached films with an academic’s commitment to historical analysis and a cinephile and fan’s zeal for acquiring and watching films, undaunted by the difficulties of procuring them.65 Crucially, they immersed themselves in learning about the particularity of the cinematic medium—“in . . . understanding . . . the similarities and differences between the cinema and the other arts.” Film society members also firmly believed that “without general culture, film culture is impossible. . . . In this film appreciation is very different from the appreciation, or the practice of, say, music.”66An apocryphal story that Chidananda Dasgupta narrated in one of his essays captures his take on the particularity of films over arts such as music or painting: “the late Ustad Fayyaz Khan, . . . one day during the years of World War II, . . . interrupted his singing of Darbari Kannada to ask one of his pupils ‘I hear there is a war on. Who is fighting whom?’ ‘The Germans and the English,’ replied the pupil. ‘They were fighting in 1914,’ said the Master, ‘and they are still carrying on, that’s a long time to fight[!].’ Having made this extraordinary pronouncement the Ustad resumed his singing.”67 Dasgupta averred that it would have been impossible to make “great” films in “such splendid isolation.” Good cinema, to the likes of Dasgupta, “can never be pure abstraction like music because it expresses itself through realistic forms.”68 Mrigankasekhar Roy cited a statement made by Dasgupta in 1961 as defining the film society movement: “Add culture to Indian

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films and you have the film society movement in India.”69 Good filmmaking was not possible without an “awareness of reality”—a factor that often led film society pioneers to denigrate the products of Indian commercial films, an attitude that in hindsight appears elitist and tinged with personal prejudice.70 As argued by Keya Ganguly, for early pioneers like Dasgupta or Ray, “cultural literacy was a matter of specialization and the stuff of the cultivation of an intelligentsia as opposed to the education of the masses.”71 Looking back in 1976, Mrigankasekhar Roy summed up the achievements of the movement in the following manner. Fifteen years ago, he observed, the exhibition of films by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, or Ritwik Ghatak would hardly have attracted any attention, but now they drew large audiences. “It is undeniable” he argued, “tastes have changed. Good films are in demand. And in bringing about this change the role played by film societies is undeniable.”72 Mrigankasekhar Roy was correct in his observation that in the late fifties and early sixties, most nonmainstream films made by Indian directors sank without a trace. One of the achievements of the movement was in having created a ground for the reception of nonmainstream films. However, it is important to note that Roy wrote his article at a time when there was extraordinary ferment within the ranks of film societies, a fact he elided in his essay. It is to these fissures and controversies that I now turn in my analysis of the second phase of the movement in 1965–80. Ray, Sen, and Ghatak’s significance on the art cinema firmament was consolidated during this period.

Later Years: Toward a Political Cinema By 1975—the fiftieth year of the international film society movement—the number of film societies had increased exponentially in India. Estimates vary; some put the tally at around 115 (with a total of 60,000 members) while others claim a number close to 169 by the end of the 1970s.73 The expansion in film society membership testified to a rising interest among Indian cineastes about trends in world cinema. Encouraged by their exposure to the movement, many young Indian directors tried making films that broke with the formula set by mainstream Hindi and other regional language cinemas. Through these shifts, the movement as a whole was transformed in significant ways. Before addressing these changes and their implications, it is important to give readers a sense of the political and social context of India during this time. As art cinema was deeply embedded in these postcolonial political developments, I will continue to make references to these events in later chapters. As vital were certain movements in world cinema. Together they constitute the discursive space within which the tumult within the film society movement during these years must be analyzed.

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The Nehruvian promise of modernizing India envisioned a strong, socialistic public sector where the government took responsibility for generating wealth and jobs through its control of public works as well as railways, banks, mining, and other industries. Yet this vision had begun to falter from the late fifties onward.74 The declaration of the first state of emergency in 1959 in Kerala, where the Communist Party had been elected to power in 1957, marked a break in the long-standing pattern of single-party hegemony in Indian politics. External issues such as border wars with China and Pakistan (in 1962 and 1965 respectively) and the huge rise in domestic unemployment, food shortages, and labor problems, led to strikes and lockouts in different parts of the country. Together, these events made the period from the mid-sixties onward a time of acute political instability in India. Mrigankasekhar Roy, whose writings have been referred to above, posited a direct link between these political developments and the film society movement. “True” he wrote, “that much of the hope independence generated crashed very soon, but the new Indian cinema that was born with the film society movement took courage in both hands to mirror the shattered hopes on celluloid.”75 Three events are especially noteworthy in terms of their impact on the film society movement during 1965–80. First, the Naxalite agitation (1967–71), a Maoist popular movement that drew students and peasants together in a violent struggle to overthrow the Indian state. The Naxalite movement did not affect the entire country but was concentrated in the states of West Bengal, Bihar, and northern Andhra Pradesh. Especially from the late sixties onward, student uprisings, defacement and destruction of statues of eminent national leaders, bomb-throwing in public places, and the brutal police suppression of these young protesting masses captured the national imagination.76 The suppression of the Naxalite movement was one of the earliest instances of the Indian state unleashing extraordinary violent measures against sections of the citizen body.77 By some accounts, four thousand supporters of the Communist Party of India were killed in police crackdowns. As noted by Sumanta Banerjee, “police informers, scabs, professional assassins, and various other sorts of bodyguards of private property stalked around bullying the citizens . . . streets were littered with bodies of young men riddled with bullets.” 78 It comes as no surprise that many directors—Anand Patwardhan, Gautam Ghose, Utpalendu Chakraborty, who were young activists during the Naxalite movement—went on to make films and documentaries about these events. For Ray, Ghatak, and Sen, whose works are the subject of part 2, as well as other filmmakers like Kumar Shahani, Shyam Benegal, and Buddhadeb Dasgupta, the political turmoil of these days framed their films and provided the context for their commentary on the fragmentation of the Indian Left. The second event of note was the 1971 Bangladesh war, which not only led to a massive influx of refugees, but also evoked memories of the not-yet-distant

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partition of the country in 1947. As noted by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, the war and its political ripples in India led to a “new turn” in cinema that was “explicitly avant-garde.” The “making of Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta productions, Ritwik Ghatak’s last great epics Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) and Jukti Takko aar Gappo (1974), and Mani Kaul’s first films” fall into this category.79 Looking back on these years, Sen remarked that “it was the worst of times for the country, and yet, the best of times for me to carry out experiments like this.”80 Finally, there was the national emergency declared by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975.81 The impact of the emergency and the draconian political measures leading up to it on commercial Hindi cinema have been documented.82 For the body of films that come under the rubric of new/parallel/art cinema, these effects have not been analyzed to the same degree. The impact of these political upheavals was reinforced by certain important trends in world cinema. It is now argued that the Third Cinema manifesto “appeared foundationally in conversation with a post May 1968 avant-garde.”83 Third Cinema manifestoes’ critiques of the typical middle-class intellectual whose “expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society” elicited strong resonance in Indian cine circles. Film society members, in particular, sympathized with these manifestoes in their refusal to prescribe a textbook definition of a political aesthetic in cinema that would function as a formal strategy for “the activation of a revolutionary consciousness.”84 Drawing on examples of low cost and artisanal cinema from European neorealist films and Griersonian documentaries, the more radical voices in the film society movement appeared to be struggling to find idioms for a “new, more powerful . . . programme for the political practice of cinema.” Such a practice, they hoped, would enable them “to conceptualize the connections between . . . [different] areas of socio-cultural life” a task for which “contemporary European aesthetic ideologies” were now seen as unhelpful.85 It is against this varied cinematic and noncinematic backdrop that we must view the conflicts within film society circles as they developed in its second phase. The issues ranged from questions of membership, censorship, and the divide between the big cities and the small mufassil towns, to the “radical” political caliber of particular directors. Though apparently disparate, these issues ultimately converge on questions about the democratization of the film society movement and the making of a politically responsible cinema in India. In a marked departure from the first phase of the movement when good cinema was largely understood as a sophisticated aesthetic product, the mid-sixties debates seemed to push the point that good cinema was one infused with a radical, leftist, even revolutionary, political sensibility. Its mark of distinction was the ability to register the contemporary social turmoil and the political anger it fueled among middle-class Indians. Yet, unlike in the fifties or early sixties, when there was agreement among cineastes that the road to this kind

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3.1 Program cover, Bergman Film Festival, Suchitra Film Society, Bangalore. Courtesy of

H. N. Narahari Rao.

of cinema lay in learning from the formal experiments carried out by French realist cinema (particularly Jean Renoir) or Italian neorealism, the mid-sixties debates exemplified a fragmentation of that consensus. As film society activists were exposed to the different new wave cinemas, such as the French, German, and Latin American ones, and to the internal differences among them, understandings of politically and socially responsible cinema became a subject of debate.

Democratization of Film Societies The first topic that exercised film society activists as the movement expanded during the 1960s was the redefining of their aims. Many commentators argued that film societies were not meant to be art house cinemas. Arun Kaul urged the leaders of the movement to impress upon the members that “a film society is not a club where people merely come to see films and go.” The raison d’être of the movement was “to build up . . . an enlightened, discriminating minority audiences [sic] which should ultimately be providing guidance to the so-called majority audiences.”86

3.2 Program notes, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi.

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Remarks such as these highlight a tension inherent in the movement. On the one hand, film societies were fired by an overt pedagogical zeal to teach the masses about good cinema. On the other, the assumption about the ordinary person’s unpreparedness to appreciate nonmainstream films raised questions about why and how such cinema might be received by the masses. If mainstream Hindi, Bengali, or Tamil films were ensnaring the vast majority of Indian audiences with glamor and glitz, then nonmainstream cinema seemed too cerebral to draw in the same audiences. Much like the Indian People’s Theater Association or People’s Writers Association, the film society movement too was caught in the conundrum that faced many left-oriented cultural organizations in India: how best to convey a progressive politics through art to the unlettered majority of Indians? Moreover, if the role of the artistic avant-garde was pedagogical, did this not, by default, make them culturally elitist vis-à-vis the majority of the people?87 The debates of this period point to the heterogeneous views of those who now manned—they were mostly men—the film societies. A critical issue that divided the movement in the sixties was again that of membership. Like Halder, Shuvendu Dasgupta, later a professor of economics at the University of Calcutta, and a very active film society worker during the late sixties and seventies, rebelled against the practice of certain film societies who shut their doors to “ordinary people.” He noted, “some people who considered themselves experts on cinema were actually quite orthodox—they were arrogant and treated the rest with disdain.”88 The “snobbery” was expressed in the restricting screenings and discussions of a handful of Indian directors, mainly Ray, Ghatak, and Sen. Dasgupta expressed regret that accomplished filmmakers such as Tapan Sinha and Tarun Majumdar, were neglected by cine clubs.89 Some film society activists remarked on the absence of women from the movement. Even though second-wave feminism had made inroads in some Indian cities, it was clearly absent from the film society movement. A. K. Pramanick, who served as a joint secretary of the Federation of Film Societies and as Film Library Officer of the National Film Archives, wrote in 1974, “Another interesting aspect of the movement in India is poor participation by the fair sex. . . . Ladies present in film society screenings are mostly wives of members with a sprinkling of girl-friends or casual guests, single girls are almost non-existent.”90 On the other side, it was alleged that the expansion in membership brought into film societies individuals who had little interest in good cinema. The allure of watching uncensored foreign films, argued critics, drew many to film society screenings. In the words of Nemai Ghosh, an active film society functionary in south India and the director of Chinnamul (1950), this new category of film society members did not regard cinema as a source of “intellectual delight” but as a source of “pathological excitement.”91 Dhruba Gupta, a professor of

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history in Calcutta and a regular contributor to film society publications, observed that many new members showed no interest in watching short films, or even older 16 mm films.92 Ray’s Pratidwandi, discussed in chapter 6, referred to the sexually prurient curiosity that drew spectators to film society screenings. Another issue provoking comment was the already widening gap between city-based film clubs and those in smaller towns, drawing criticism from film society activists like Shuvendu Dasgupta and Samik Bandyopadhyay. Bandyopadhyay remarked at a function co-organized by three societies of Calcutta, Asansol, and Naihati that, in a politically disturbed region like Imphal (in northeastern India), there were two active film societies that held film appreciation courses and also hosted film screenings even as armored tanks rolled through the city. But these groups, he complained, barely received a mention in metropolitan cine club discussions.93 Many film society activists across India shared Bandyopadhyay’s concerns. For example, the noted Malayalam filmmaker and film society pioneer, G. Aravindan, observed during the 1970s that “the real movement is not in the cities, it is in small towns and villages and this is a very significant aspect.”94 As an example of cine activism in rural areas, one could mention the film festival organized in Heggodu, Karnataka by the Nilakanteshwara Natyaseva Sangha (Ninasam) Chitrasamaja, or Ninansam Film Society, founded in 1973.95 Described as “a remote village,” Heggodu had “facilities of electricity, a post office, and education up to matriculation.”96 Nearly a thousand people attended the screenings daily. This, despite the fact that the festival was scheduled during harvest season when the villagers “are busy both day and night.” For a few villagers, attending film shows was a “virgin experience.”97 Twelve black-andwhite films in the 16 mm format, including some documentaries, were screened during the six-day (December  19–24, 1977) film-festival. The list included Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955), Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948), Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925), Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) Wages of Fear (Henri- Georges Clouzot, 1953), Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), Happy Anniversary (Pierre Étaix, 1962), Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) and Satyajit Ray (B. D. Garga, 1963). The Ninasam Film Society’s selection procedures were guided by its zeal to expose the uninitiated audience to classics in world cinema and maintain a balance between “emotionalism” and “cerebralism.” They were keen to “depict struggle for the basic necessities of life on different historical and topographical backdrops.” The report on the film festival noted “none of the films screened here . . . has any explicit sex-scene (with the exception of a kiss in Rashomon).”98 As observed in the same report, “With this experimental programme the pseudo-high-brow notion that laymen—especially the rustic, cannot appreciate films of artistic excellence comes to an end.”99 While the

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founder of the Ninasam Film Society, the noted theater personality, K. V. Subbanna, and acclaimed Kannada film director, Girish Kasaravalli, introduced the films, some twenty volunteers circulated among the audience, “at least a section of” which did “not even know the name of this country is India,” to study their reactions to the films.100 The Heggodu film festival reflected a spirit of urban, middle-class self-critique. It would be some years before the

3.3 Chitralekha staff, letter to Celluloid Film Society, Delhi University, concerning

rental of Swayamvaram (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1972).

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clash of urban and rural worldviews and wisdoms would be thematized in films, notably by Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and John Abraham. There were efforts among film societies to expand their endeavors into a film cooperative movement. The Chitralekha venture stands out in this respect. Adoor Gopalakrishnan and K. B. Nair, the founders of that film society, even drew up a detailed scheme to promote art theaters throughout Kerala that would “provide employment opportunities to the educated unemployed.” Although it did not come to fruition, the utopian democratic drive envisioned the building of art film theaters into rural areas covered by panchayats, and in cities across Kerala. The authors even specified the educational qualifications of staff, emoluments, ticket prices, building costs, rentals for air-conditioned and nonair-conditioned theaters, and program details.101 Finally, the democratization of film societies also produced sharp differences of opinion in the ways active members came to regard the works of particular directors. These arguments were no longer made in the abstract or with reference to foreign films but using examples from the works of Indian directors. Much of the discussion rejected the ideals of “good cinema” as formulated by the film society pioneers of the 1950s. The principal question now debated was whether good cinema could any longer afford to remain unmoved by the sociopolitical realities of India. Good cinema could not be so called if it was divorced either in its form or content from problems such as unemployment, illiteracy, poverty, violence, war, the plight of refugees, class differences, and other such issues that were seen as corroding the Indian social fabric. These debates over good cinema map on to earlier debates involving the PWA, for instance, between “political” literature versus a literature by men of taste—a sign of the politicization of the film society movement.102 The divide between aesthetics and politics in turn produced a series of binary oppositions that have dogged art cinema debates worldwide: realism versus modernism, transparency versus reflexivity, and illusionism and idealism versus materialism.103 Unsurprisingly, films by Ghatak, Ray, and Sen occupied disproportionate space in these debates. Even though Ray was by the mid-sixties the most renowned of the three, his global success did not guarantee him favorable reception at home. During 1959– 73, he made several films which opened to strong criticism from Calcutta’s film-society critics.104 According to Ashok Rudra, a Bengali economist interested in cultural debates, Ray gave no evidence in most of his films of “any comprehension” of contemporary India’s social problems or of “any capacity or inclination to tackle them.” The only exceptions were Kanchenjungha (1961) and Devi (1959). The former centered on the tensions that unfold during a middleclass family’s vacation in Darjeeling, a hill station famous for its views of the Himalayan peaks, and the latter on the deification of a young woman by her patriarchal father-in-law as a goddess with miraculous powers that ultimately drove her to suicide. Yet, argued Rudra:

3.4 Chitralekha project prospectus, 1973. Courtesy of Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

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3.5 “Satyajit Ray in a pensive mood,” Montage, Anandam, Bombay. Description of picture on reverse of cover.

One could have taken Kanchanjungha as a seriously optimistic film if it were shown that the characters were trying to find ways out for themselves by consciously changing the constricting and inhibiting environmental conditions, of course, to the extent possible. But nothing like that is done. Problems are posed, and they get simply resolved . . . and the only factor

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accounting for the miracle seems to be the magnificent beauty of the Kanchenjungha. If this is the way Ray would like to be humanist . . . there is indeed very little we can hope for from him in the line of treatment of modern problems.105

Not one to remain silent, Ray offered a feisty response to Rudra. “I should have thought,” he noted, “the very elements of the film—the near fairy-tale setting, the holiday mood, the two-hour span of the narrative, the fact that the characters have been divorced from their normal surroundings—would debar expectation of a realistic thrashing out of the problems . . . I am afraid Sri Rudra will have to search long and hard for the kind of film he is looking for: the vast lumbering saga in which every problem will be thrashed out . . . every emotional conflict played out, each to its ultimate limit; in which the sweet little child who does not understand today will, as Sri Rudra puts it, ‘understand one day,’ and then she will cease to be sweet, she will become unhappy, gloomy, and full of complexes.”106 Ray was repeatedly criticized for his alleged failure to address social realities. The desire for political cinema, rather than “superb craftsmanship” in filmmaking, was the main reason behind many film society activists’ disappointment with Ray, whom they derided, despite his success with international and domestic audiences, as a “bourgeois” filmmaker. A film like Ashani Sanket (1973), based on the famine of 1943, epitomized for many film society viewers Ray’s tendency to aestheticize, through his impeccable cinematic sensibility, the horrors of a man-made famine. They had hoped that the film would act as an allegory for the food riots of the 1960s. As one disappointed commentator wrote in Frontier: “We all hoped that we would again find the man who stood with his head high leading the silent procession in memory of the food movement martyrs in 1966. But alas, the procession has marched forward. The leader has straggled behind.”107 I will have more to say on Ray’s perspective (as well as Sen and Ghatak’s) in part 2. My focus here is on the controversy their films generated in film society circles. If Ray was generally viewed in film society circles as lacking in political radicalism, this was not a charge that faced Mrinal Sen. Sen, more than any other filmmaker of the time, engaged with the politics of the Maoist-inclined Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI [M-L]). His technique of utilizing news clippings and documentary footage was praised as avant-garde. Referring to his two films Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter, 1973) and Calcutta 71 (1972), the same Ashok Rudra who had criticized Ray wrote, “what gets reflected . . . is precisely the auto-criticism that is taking place among the ranks of the party.” He compared Sen to Godard as a director “who at the height of professional success, renounced film making for entertainment and money making, and is using it strictly as an instrument of political action.”108

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3.6 Special issue on Mrinal Sen, Chitrabikshan, Cine Central Film Society, Calcutta.

But even Sen could not satisfy all his left-leaning film society comrades. Some questioned the fact that the FFC financed his films. In the words of one commentator, “When the ruling power is witch-hunting the extremists throughout the country . . . destroying all genuine freedom of speech and expression, it is a matter of great wonder that they will finance Mr.  Sen’s

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effort at glorifying the cause of the extremists.” Seeing Sen as a stooge of the establishment, this writer concluded, “it may well be that in these days of sophistication it is the well-considered policy of the government not to come to a direct confrontation with the intellectuals, but to slowly win them over.” It is worth quoting some more passages from this letter from one Probodh Dhar Chakraborty from Howrah if only to highlight the tone of the criticism: The message of both Calcutta 71 and Padatik (Sen’s films) is shrouded in abstract intellectualism. . . . Though it deals with serious themes as poverty and revolution, Calcutta 71 fails to convince any one of any ideal to fight for a new world. Padatik may well be an object of hot discussion in coffee houses, cafes, and restaurants but it can never be an inspiration for revolutionaries.109

In another passage of the same letter, he gives an example from Sen’s film Padatik which, to his mind, was an obvious distortion of “reality”: “Can one furnish one case in which a young middle class revolutionary escaping from a prison van, has taken shelter in a multi-storeyed flat of a woman executive? To give a touch of reality to this romantic fantasy Mrinal Sen had no other option but to show that her younger brother was also a revolutionary shot dead by the police.”110 The director who emerges as the most favored in film society writings was Ritwik Ghatak. There were several reasons for this. First, the producer of most of Ghatak’s films was Pramod Lahiri, a member of the Cine Club of Calcutta. This made it easy for film societies to exhibit Ghatak’s films. Second, many regarded Ghatak to be true breakaway from the dominant modes of narrative cinema established by Hollywood or Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. Let me just flag some salient features of Ghatak’s oeuvre here to help the reader understand his appeal to film societies. Ghatak started out as a communist cultural worker with IPTA and then came into filmmaking with Nagarik, completed in 1952, but released posthumously in the 1970s. Ghatak’s later films wove in multiple themes of the decline that had set in postcolonial Bengali bhadralok (respectable) lives that resonated deeply with film society audiences.111 His background in IPTA made him introduce theater as topos within his films, where many dramatic crises unfolded, forcing his audiences to ponder the problems facing political theater in India in the face of more commercially viable forms of entertainment. According to Kumar Shahani, who studied with Ghatak during the latter’s stint at the Poona Film Institute, and who was an active member of the Anandam film society, Ghatak’s work constituted a defiant assertion of identity that challenged both indigenous and Western structures of domination. “In an atmosphere where our cultural attitudes and artifacts have been identified with the objectification of effete Brahminism and European humanism inflicted on us

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by the colonials, Ritwikda’s work is the violent assertion of our identity. It is the cry of the dying girl in Meghe Dhaka Tara that echoes through the hills, our right to live.”112 In his book on the cinemas of the Indian partition, Bhaskar Sarkar argues that juxtaposed with Ray’s restrained modernism, Ghatak’s excessive melodrama often baffled “bourgeois urban audiences.” But not his followers in film societies. As observed by Amiya Bagchi, better known for his works on economic history than on films, “Ghatak not only appropriated mythopoeic images to his own art, in some sense he also effected a restitution of the myths to the original makers, rescuing them from a Brahmanised or reified, demonic state. Instead of myths exercising a supernatural power over people, in Ghatak’s art, they became tools of people’s power.”113 Another aspect of Ghatak’s work that film society circles received sympathetically, contrary to similar elements in Ray, was his treatment of superstitions and rituals. “Ghatak did not . . . share the Bengali liberal’s distaste for what he considered to be the superstitions or rituals clouding the visions of ordinary people in our country. The liberation of the people would not for him mean an existence where life had been purged of all social ritual, and all spontaneous expression . . . though it may not always meet the standards of the cultivated taste of an enlightened Indian.”114 Finally, film societies lauded Ghatak’s handling of the traumas of partition in a nonprescriptive manner. Many film society writings attempted to rescue “Ghatak’s obsessive use of the theme of partition of Bengal” from accusations of nostalgia: “Beyond the whys and wherefores of the partition lies the grim fact of the cruelty of the whole process . . . the utter senselessness of it.”115

✳✳✳ To summarize some of the most striking achievements of film societies in a telegraphic fashion, we would have to note the role played by various societies in highlighting all aspects of filmmaking and in organizing retrospectives of Indian studio-era films and the works of certain foreign directors. Film societies first introduced Indian audiences to Iranian, Czech, Korean, and other emerging cinemas of the world.116 Second, film societies provided a space for the exhibition of short films and documentaries like Amar Lenin (Ritwik Ghatak, 1970), Mukti Chai (Utpalendu Chakraborty, 1977) or Hungry Autumn (Gautam Ghose, 1974) on controversial, antiestablishment themes such as famines and political prisoners.117 Third, film societies were a “forum to [exhibit] films which would not be in normal commercial circuits.”118 Fourth, the influence of the film society movement radiated into other regions of the global South. For example, the noted Bangladeshi director and film society organizer, Alamgir Kabir (1937–1989), wrote how inspired he felt by the film society movement in West Bengal when he was a visitor there during the 1971 liberation war. Upon his

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3.7 Special issue on cinematography and cinematographers, Chitrabhaash, North

Calcutta Film Society.

return to Bangladesh, Kabir and other comrades such as Muhammad Khasru “institutionalized” the film society movement in the newly founded nation-state. Anthropologist Lotte Hoek’s research on Bangladeshi film societies reveals the deep influence of and overlaps with their counterparts in West Bengal.119

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Finally, film societies made cinema a site of debate for academics and intellectuals who were not otherwise specialists on films. Their debates in the 1960s and 1970s provoked a broader efflorescence of critical views about “political cinema” and its relationship to “the people” of India. It cannot be without significance that many of the participants in these debates had little to do with the making or marketing of films. It is striking, for instance, to stay with the example of the intellectual turmoil in Calcutta in the 1960s, that so many publications on nonmainstream cinema in India came from humanistically inclined social scientists—Amiya Bagchi (economist), Pranab Bardhan (economist), Gautam Bhadra (historian), Anjan Ghosh (sociologist), Dhruba Gupta (historian), Shuvendu Dasgupta (economist), and Ashok Rudra (economist)—to take some names at random.120 Journals like Mainstream or Frontier, which were political organs for politically inclined scholars, played host to many film society debates that have been briefly referenced above. In retrospect, however, we must note that despite their commitment to democratic ideals and emphasis on viewing cinema as an object of intellectual debate, film societies failed to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the larger Indian audience and their love of popular cinema.121 Analyzing the documents of film societies today—their journals, program notes, posters, and reminiscences—it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that these constitute a very different kind of archive of cinema in India than the National Film Archives. In these film society archives, cinema is a matter of judgment. Unlike archivists like P. K. Nair (India) or Henri Langlois (France) or Ernst Lindgren (Britain), film societies were actively engaged in questions about good and bad films. For them, taste and political preference were one and the same. And there were ethical stakes in foregrounding the politics of cinematic aesthetics to engage with the historical present. Unlike the sense of futurity underpinning state-run national archives, these littleknown cine archives from postcolonial India are one example of useful, and, one might say with Nietzsche, an advantageous, history for life in the present.122

CHAPTER 4

RITWIK GHATAK AND THE OVERCOMING OF HISTORY

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rt films embody particular modes of historical understanding. I begin an analysis of this claim with this chapter’s focus on Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara (The CloudCapped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E-Flat, 1961), and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962). Film scholars and Ghatak’s contemporaries have remarked on the centrality of the partition of 1947 in his films. Bhaskar Sarkar described Ghatak as the “most celebrated auteur of Partition narratives.”1 Satyajit Ray remarked that the “tragedy of Partition” was “Ritwik’s lifelong obsession. He himself hailed from what was once East Bengal where he had deep roots. It is rarely that a director dwells so singlemindedly on the same theme. It only serves to underline the depth of his feeling for the subject.”2 The division of India into two nation-states was already an accomplished fact by the time Ghatak began making films. One of these, Pakistan, would splinter further in 1971, into Pakistan and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan). How do we understand the centrality of the event of the partition in Ghatak’s films? He made it no secret that postpartition Bengalis were all “refugees” in his eyes. The reference was presumably only to Hindu Bengalis, for Bengali Muslims and their lifeworlds make scant appearance in his films.3 Despite the overwhelming preoccupation with partition, Ghatak stressed that he was not a filmmaker of “despair and decadence.”4 His historical stance, as I see it, was twofold. His films registered the deep sense of loss and instability engendered by partition, but they also claimed emphatically that the political split of the nation-state did not annul the collective life of the

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Bengali people in the postcolonial present. In this chapter, I turn to an analysis of the cinematic idiom he forged to express this historical stance—of acknowledging the violence of political history but also wanting to transcend it at the same time, a double move that sought to combine mourning with hope. Analysts of Ghatak’s cinema acknowledge that his films departed from the protocols of cinematic realism that found its “classic formulation” in India in the 1950s.5 Many Bengali film commentators had an entirely negative view of this aspect of his work. The critic Samik Bandyopadhyay used interviews with notable film actors and theater personalities Utpal Dutt and Bijon Bhattacharya (the latter starred in three of Ghatak’s films), and with lighting expert Tapas Sen, to make the case that Ghatak’s lack of “discipline,” “erratic,” and “anarchic” temperament destroyed principles of continuity in his films.6 Ghatak’s attempt to bring together Karl Marx and C. G. Jung in his films was read as a sign of “arrogance” that resulted in a retreat into “mysticism,” an occlusion of the dialectical and revolutionary movement of history by appeal to a static structure of Bengali consciousness/identity now elevated to the status of a deity.7 A crucial means by which Ghatak sought to resist and depart from the realist mode of narration was in the placement of numerous song sequences in his films, a feature that has not elicited significant discussion in studies on Ghatak, unlike the use of nonverbal music and other sound effects, which have.8 Composer Bhaskar Chandavarkar, who overlapped with him in Pune, writes with deep appreciation and insight about the music and soundtrack of Ghatak’s films, but also avers that it was excessive: He does not bother to visually justify the sounds or instruments used. Bhatiyali singers are seen plucking their one-string tukaris but later when Shankar sings in the street, the sound track teems with tabla, tanpura, and swaramandala sounds as if it were a mehfil (musical gathering)—instead of a lone singer on the street. The crackle of the boiling rice-pot is at times overdone. The very idea of using the sound of the whiplash bespeaks the expressive artistic caliber of the filmmaker. Others would have used it once. But not Ritwikda. He uses it three times and each subsequent time it seems to linger on a little longer than it should.

Hence his trenchant conclusion to an otherwise warm and respectful essay: “Ritwikda lacked a sense of proportion. His love for music, like his taste for alcohol, knew no bounds. His passion banished reason and logic.”9 My attention in this chapter is given to the song sequences in Ghatak’s trilogy. The aesthetic and political consequence of these for his films’ narratives must be probed in order for us to understand the relationship between Ghatak’s

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films and contemporary historical sensibility. Films, one could say, were his attempt to produce an alternative mode of “historicality as the true historical essence of man” that would suspend and bracket accounts of the political and social histories of the Bengali people who now found themselves divided between the two new nation-states of India and Pakistan.10 Ranajit Guha, in History at the Limits of World History (2002), calls for a recuperation of “historicality” capable of registering the humble and the everyday in the face of a historiography written with “statist blinkers.”11 Inspired by the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, who was also a crucial influence on Ghatak, Guha argues that “the life lived in the civil society was never annexed fully to the statist, universal, world-history narratives introduced in South Asia by the West. Nor did historiography, its instrument, succeed in penetrating deeply enough the historicality which informed that life. It is precisely this inadequacy that is the object of Tagore’s critique.”12 In Guha’s interpretation of Tagore, literature’s particular and creative construction of temporality recovers the “living historicality of the quotidian.”13 Film, likewise, and the song sequences in films, were Ghatak’s means of critically intervening in and also transcending the political temporality of the postcolonial Indian state. Given the centrality of songs to the “deep structure” of popular cinema in India, all too often scholars have attempted to characterize “alternative cinema” as that which must necessarily do away with the song number.14 Even a passing familiarity with the body of films designated as art cinema demonstrates the fallacy inherent in such views. There is a rich body of scholarship that analyzes the significance of the song and dance numbers in the popular Hindi cinema. For Bengali and other regional cinemas, however, such work is largely absent. Songs played a powerful role in art films, not just in Ghatak’s, but also in those by his illustrious contemporary, Ray.15 But what marks out the song numbers in Ghatak’s work is the striking alteration in temporality that the song sequences effect, something that has fundamental political implications, I suggest, for how we read his films as producing alternative postcolonial histories. There are a handful of nonmusical moments too when this occurs, such as in the scene in Subarnarekha where a young Sita playing on the abandoned airstrip encounters the bohurupi (itinerant performer who took on many disguises) dressed up in a demonic mask of the goddess Kali. In his powerful deployment of mythic archetypes, notes Priya Jaikumar, Ghatak “writes back to the past against the grain of India’s present, which was ushering in a triumphalist secular democracy linked to violent partitions, politically fragmented land masses, and divided waters.”16 It is most palpably through the songs, however, that Ghatak consistently ruptures a sense of the present as a time of developmental transition that connects colonial pasts to modern, postcolonial futures. If the temporal structure of a film’s narrative was one that situated the film in a definite moment in the history of the postcolonial nation-state, the songs

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deliberately broke with that moment by transporting both the characters in the film and its viewers simultaneously to the realm of the mythic and the poetic. Not just any viewer, however. Ghatak, I argue, depends on a certain tradition of Bengali poetry to produce these effects. He uses not just music and tune; the words of the songs, their literary allusions and histories, are just as important for his ability to achieve this transportation. Ghatak moves between film and Bengali poetry; this intermediality, one might say, marks a deliberate performance of provincialism or even parochialism that seeks to resist his films’ insertion into the global category of “world cinema.” It is as though the very idea of a global world as conjured in the expression “world cinema” is called into question by Ghatak’s deliberate provincialism. By rooting his politics in the earth, language, rivers, cities, villages, cosmologies, and tribes of Bengal— elements with which the songs are redolent—Ghatak offers intimations into what some scholars today would regard as the realm of the planetary.17

Ghatak’s Intermediality To understand the critical function of the song sequence in Ghatak’s films, this chapter makes three related, if somewhat unexpected, moves. Together, they open up a different genealogy for Ghatak’s filmmaking. I demonstrate, first, that Ghatak had a special relationship with Bengali literature, in particular the work of the Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). This entails working through in some detail the deep citations in the films, especially Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha, of Tagore’s works. The affinity between Ghatak’s films and Tagore’s literature, however, is not exhausted by these citations. Ghatak depends on certain poetic meanings internal to the songs to make the postcolonial here-and-now he inhabited plural, introducing mythic and nonsecular temporalities into the postpartition present. Since many of the songs in question were written and set to music by none other than Tagore, who saw the form of the song as an extension of the poetic, my second step is to analyze a particular gadyakabita, or “prose poem,” in which Tagore used song to evoke heterotemporality. The relation between words and music, as developed in the history of modernity in Bengal, was crucial for both Tagore and his follower, Ghatak, in effecting this sense of temporal rupture. The final section of this chapter will focus on two song sequences from Meghe Dhaka Tara to illustrate the operation of these moments. My intermedial reading of Ghatak is inspired, in part, by Manishita Dass’s recent analysis of his films in terms of “cinematic theatricality.” Reminding readers of Ghatak’s statements about melodrama as a “deliberate refinement of the dramatic,” “a birthright,” and “a form,” Dass calls attention to the frequent moments of “hypertheatricality” in his films that were either denigrated

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by critics as over-the-top or celebrated as original and politically committed for their ability to jolt audiences out of complete absorption in the narrative.18 “All these techniques,” she writes, “are profoundly theatrical in the dual sense of emphasizing both the artifice at the heart of cinematic storytelling and the recollection of space and conventions of theatrical performance. Yet the theatricality of these techniques relies not so much on a direct borrowing from the theatre as on a theatrical manipulation of the film form: cinematography, editing, mise-en-scene and the sound-image relationship.”19 Interestingly there is not, by Dass’s own account, sufficient information about Ghatak’s actual practice as a theater director “to assess the comparative strengths of his cinematic and theatrical practice.” Reminiscences by his comrades from the Indian People’s Theater Association suggest instead that Ghatak was not enough of a theater man as his vision of the theatrical was often too “exaggerated” and “poetic” to be “credibly implemented on stage.”20 Dass’s interpretation of Ghatak’s intermediality between film and theater therefore relies on a close reading of moments where “theatrical and cinematic forms” fused. By contrast, my efforts at an intermedial reading rests on demonstrating the imbrication of literature and cinema through Ghatak’s citations of Tagore as well as my analysis of the impact of the prose poem.

Ritwik Ghatak and Literature Ghatak’s rootedness in literature shows clearly in his films and writings. It is important to bear in mind that he professed no special fidelity to film, unlike his two confreres discussed in this book. Film was a “medium of expression, . . . a tool” he came to for its capacity to “move millions of people together,” unlike literature or theater. “If I find a better medium in future, I shall simply chuck out film (and move to that medium). I don’t love film.”21 He had “not watched many films” he once wrote, as “one does not have the good fortune of seeing too many films in this country.”22 Ghatak started his career as a writer. “Initially, I was a writer. I have written about a hundred short stories and two novels since the beginning of my career, from way back in 1943.”23 Ghatak’s short stories, notes Sumanta Banerjee, show the same “inclination for intellectual argument, the ever-present critique of social evils, the dreamlike blend of the romantic and the tragic, the nostalgic longing for a lost El Dorado, the undercurrent of satire” that would later permeate his films. A melodramatic streak marked several short stories such as “The Deposition” (“Ejahar,” 1947), “Comrade” (1949), “The Earthly Paradise Remains Unshaken” (“Bhuswarga achanchal,” 1948). Banerjee draws particular attention to the “dream of an El Dorado— or the search for something beyond the present surroundings” as a characteristic feature of many short

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stories, notably, “Shikha” (1947), “On the Trail of the Milky Way” (“Akash gangar srot dharey,” 1947). Ghatak’s cousin, the noted litterateur, Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016), who grew up with the director, recalled “In our country home, the autumnal full moon would work wonders on our childhood fantasies. . . . The far off bamboo grove emerging as a dividing line between our village and the next, conjured up alluring images of El Dorado for us.”24 A recurrent theme in Ghatak’s essays was that all great art is ultimately poetry. In “Cinema and the Subjective Factor,” he wove together the poetic with his understanding of archetypes, the latter drawn from Jung. There were two groups of people in the history of civilization: the “tender-minded” ones and the “tough-minded” ones. The former, upon whom devolved the task of giving shape and expression to the “images and symbols of the dark deep” consisted of the rishis, poets, shamans, singers. The dialectic between the objective conditions of life and their subjective interpretation by the tender-minded folk rendered all “art” into “poetry.” “Poetry is the archetype of all creativity. Cinema at its best turns into poetry.”25 Bengali writers peopled Ghatak’s world. Describing the milieu in which he came of age, he wrote, “We were born into a critical age. In our boyhood we have seen a Bengal, whole and glorious. Rabindranath, with his towering genius, was at the height of his literary creativity, while Bengali literature was experiencing a fresh blossoming with the works of the Kallol group,” a significant group of writers who identified themselves as a post-Tagore generation that broke free of the senior poet’s allegedly romantic-idealist style. He mentioned a number of littérateurs, Gopal Halder, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, and Manik Bandyopadhyay, whom he met during his involvement with IPTA. They were people he knew through his older brother, Manish Ghatak, who wrote under the nom de plume Jubanashwa, and was a major figure of Kallol.26 In Ghatak’s case, however, Rabindranath Tagore’s influence was as great as that of Marxist realism and such modernist groups such as Kallol and Parichay. Bengali romanticism was a key constituent of his modernism. He singled out with favor the Marxist poet Subhas Mukhopadhyay, whose poetry exuded a materialist, activist fervor together with a romantic appreciation of the Bengal countryside: “A million clenched fists rise to the sky militantly asserting their existence, even as the beams of a fledgling sun fall aslant on a cluster of paddy stalks, touching their edges and turning them into shimmering lines.” “A film,” Ghatak argued, “reports from both frontiers, fights at both.” Put differently, he saw a relationship between “the most intimate impulses of an individual,” “the collective unconscious” and the “play of a common socio-political class consciousness.” Decrying the tendency within Indian leftist political parties to see cinema, literature, and theater as an “appendage” to “political ideology,” he mounted a critique of those who regarded Rabindranath Tagore as “a poet of feudalism, of semi-colonial, religious mysticism, and hence of no account.”27

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When asked about his “affinity to Rabindranath Tagore” he responded, “I cannot speak without him. That man has culled all my feelings long before my birth. He has understood what I am.”28 In Ghatak’s self-understanding, his present merged with Tagore’s.

Komal Gandhar: The Film and Two Poems Komal Gandhar (1932) is the name of a poem by Tagore.29 In 1953, the modernist poet Bishnu Dey (1909–1982), a member of the left-leaning little magazine Parichay, published a book of poetry called Komal Gandhar that also contained a poem called “Naam Rekhechi Komal Gandhar Mone Mone” (I have named it komal gandhar in my mind) after the first line of Tagore’s poem. The flattened third note on the musical scale, komal gandhar, aptly translated by Moinak Biswas as the “gandhar sublime,” features prominently in a lot of Indian ragas and is evocative of pathos.30 In Tagore’s short poem, komal gandhar is a special, admittedly unusual name given by the poet to an unknown woman. His description of her serene manner evocative of the morning raga, bhairavi, resonates with Ghatak’s depiction of Anasuya in the film.31 Dey’s poem, “Naam Rekhechi Komal Gandhar Mone Mone,”32 dedicated to fellow poet and composer Jyotirindra Moitra (1911–1977), the music director of Meghe Dhaka Tara and Komal Gandhar, is not about an individual. The sea replaces the unknown woman here as a sublime figure. It is vast, vigorous, and varied, an entity that absorbs the malaise of the city. Dey imagined Bengal as an undivided entity that included the Indian northeastern states, as well as Orissa and Bihar. Into the sea flow (undivided) Bengal’s many rivers—the Hooghly, Rupnarayan, Matla, and Mahanadi. It spreads to distant shores that border Java, Cambodia, and China. Just as the bhairavi raga characterized Tagore’s human komal gandhar, Dey’s nonhuman one is likened with ragas malkauns and kanara. The sea’s musical majesty revives the “rotten enervation of Calcutta’s corpses.” It washes away the city’s heat, dust, sweat, grime, weariness, and fatigue, and erases its noise described as a “coca-cola song.”33 The power of Tagore’s and Dey’s words lift readers from the threshold of the everyday, out of the city and its daily life into a loftier, spiritual level that is poignant and vast. Ghatak’s film Komal Gandhar also intersperses everyday experience with moments that transport viewers to a plane greater than the postcolonial quotidian through a powerful combination of images and music. In an essay on Komal Gandhar, Ghatak wrote, “The aim of this film was the presentation of a specific subject. . . . [I have used] a familiar triangular structure as one would an allegory in order to penetrate deep into the subject matter. The word ‘subject’ has a literary flavor. So too does allegory. . . . The art of film has unhesitatingly utilized literary means whether indirectly or in a

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simple manner.” Komal Gandhar, a film that evokes Ghatak’s days in the Indian People’s Theater Association, is on one level the love story of Bhrigu and Anasuya, two dedicated artists belonging to rival theater groups. At another, the film also charts the trials and tribulations of those two theater troupes, Nirikkha (Observation) and Dakshina Path (The Southern Way), until they merge in the end to constitute a robust and democratic cultural unit that will stage plays in different rural centers of Bengal. Through her time with the groups and the numerous quarrels and mishaps that erupt, Anasuya realizes that her true love is Bhrigu and not the boyfriend who left India to seek his fortune in Europe. The film ends with Bhrigu and Anasuya coming together as comrades and as a couple who will devote their life to working for the cause of theater. Komal Gandhar allegorizes the partition of Bengal through the fractures that plagued the two theater groups as well as the many misunderstandings between Bhrigu and Anasuya. The union of both groups and the protagonists at the end is a projection of Ghatak’s utopian desire for the unification of the two severed provinces. Labor in the cultural sphere played an important role in that project. “The dominant tenor of Komal Gandhar is [one of] union. The pain I experienced upon the partition of Bengal is what I wished to express . . . I am no politician. My business is with people’s minds. It is not my job to show how the two Bengals can be unified. I can only love. . . . Let me conclude by returning to first principles. They have to do with union. Until the day the two Bengals are united the fate of Bengal shall remain broken. This is the main subject of Komal Gandhar.”34 Since “unification” was its “central theme,” he noted elsewhere, there was “the persistent use of old marriage songs; even during scenes of pain and separation the music sings of marriage.”35 Komal Gandhar cites directly from poems by Tagore and Dey. Bhrigu recites the first line of Tagore’s poem to Anasuya as they walk along a riverbank near Santiniketan. He explains that it was a poem about a young girl whose beauty was like a pristine melody that even the most cacophonous surroundings could not destroy. “Just like our Bengal,” responds Anasuya, shifting the register from the individual to a region, thus transitioning to Dey’s sense of komal gandhar. Ghatak’s film merges both referents of komal gandhar, the feminine human and the natural nonhuman, woman and province, and individual and planet, that have both withstood many storms. The two senses invoked by the poems are most powerfully merged in the last scenes. The camera focuses on Anasuya’s and Bhrigu’s joined hands—evoking the gandharva-style marital union of Shakuntala and Dushyanta—as centuriesold wedding folk songs, a constant feature of Komal Gandhar’s soundtrack, play in the background.36 It then pans from the two individuals to shots of the great riverine plains of Bengal, Himalayan mountains, the Calcutta cityscape, and the sky above, before returning to rest on Anasuya’s face, head tilted slightly

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4.1 Anasuya and Bhrigu, Komal Gandhar.

toward the camera, eyes closed, and tears of joy streaming down her face. The movement of shots from the couple to nature and the city is complemented by the transition from the wedding folk songs to a rabindrasangeet (Tagore song) that celebrates being born into the soil, water, air, and flowers of Bengal. The rapid movement of images against the changing soundtrack introduces transcendent repose into the dénouement. The couple—Bhrigu and Anasuya— represented a projection of Ghatak’s desire for unity between different cultural organizations as well as between the eastern and the western parts of Bengal. Ghatak also mentions Tagore’s essay, “Shakuntala,” as an inspiration for his film. “Komal Gandhar. Shakuntala became Bengal for me. Rabi-Thakur’s beautiful essay—the one with the striking comparison between Shakuntala and Miranda influenced me.”37 Framed as a comparison between Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala) and William Shakespeare’s Tempest, Tagore’s essay outlines some differences between Western and Indian literatures.38 Inspired by Goethe’s brief but lofty description of Shakuntala as a tale that brought together “the flower of youth and the fruit of maturity, heaven and earth,” Tagore mounted a forceful argument about Shakuntala’s distinctiveness from Miranda.39 Kalidasa’s Shakuntala “tells the story of the hermit girl Shakuntala, the daughter of the celestial nymph Menaka and the sage Vishvamitra. The poet Kalidasa intends Shakuntala to be the focus of attention.

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This is not the story of King Dushyanta or their son, Bharata, . . . whose rule gives India its Sanskrit name: Bharata.”40 Tagore maintains the focus on Shakuntala in his essay. Shakuntala and Dushyanta’s relationship went through innumerable travails after its first youthful flourish. When Durvasa, the angry sage, erases Dushyanta’s memory of her by a curse, Shakuntala becomes a devastatingly lonely figure. Kalidasa did not return her to the comfortable familiarity of the forest hermitage (tapovan), to her friends and foster parents. Nor did he recount her grief in words. The stillness of her sorrow reverberated in his silence about her surroundings. Even though the tale has a happy ending, Shakuntala and Dushyanta come together as two very different individuals fundamentally transformed by grief. Shakuntala, for Tagore, was the allegory of a cosmic design by which a profoundly hurtful deed became a harbinger of something auspicious. Dushyanta’s forgetting of Shakuntala was the putative beginning of Indian civilization through their son, Bharat. The undivided landmass of India came to be designated after the latter. The Tempest was not about transcendental love or auspiciousness. As the title suggests, it is a tale of conflict and stormy relationships among humans, and between humans and nature. In Tagore’s analysis, the Tempest was a story of material might, while Shakuntala was a tale of spirituality and restraint. The contrast mirrors Partha Chatterjee’s discursive separation within Indian nationalist thought between the material and spiritual domains of life.41 Kalidasa deliberately avoided providing readers with details on earthly matters in ways favored by Shakespeare. Realism was not his avowed goal. Shakuntala was a fine exponent of kavya (literary work) in which beauty, truth, and auspiciousness prevailed to produce spiritual union and salvation. Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar is saturated with references to Shakuntala. The film’s center is Anasuya (one without envy, the name of one of the literary heroine Shakuntala’s companions), a role essayed by Supriya Choudhury, the young theater artist whose luminous beauty, quiet pain, and uncontaminated idealism are repeatedly accentuated through close-ups in soft focus. At the start of the film, she playfully refers to herself as a Miranda who is waiting to be united with her Ferdinand. As the dramatic action unfolds, and we witness her endurance of personal and professional slights, she becomes more like Kalidasa’s (and Tagore’s) Shakuntala. Shakuntala also functions as a mise en abyme in the film when the theater group performs Kalidasa’s play. In an effort to help her get into the lead character, Bhrigu tells Anasuya to imagine Calcutta as her tapovan. He urges her to think of the fiery processions in the city as Shakuntala’s beloved creepers, Nabamallika and Banajyotsna, and the poor children begging on the street as deer cubs in the forest hermitage. Bhrigu, an allusion to Ghatak’s ideal cultural worker, imagines politics, humans, Sanskrit kavya, the city, and nature as a unity. The film’s ending, with the

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unification of the couple and their resolve to take group theater to small towns around Bengal, carried intimations of the union and harmony that were central motifs in Tagore’s essay. As Ghatak wrote, “Komal Gandhar . . . has unification as its central motif. I tried to put layer upon layer, allegory upon allegory, to see if I could touch that great truth of unification in a flash of lightning somewhere.”42

Subarnarekha and “Shishutirtha” The spirit of Tagore’s prose poem “Shishutirtha” (“The Child,” 1930) similarly animated Subarnarekha. As Ghatak noted in his essay about the film and its literary influence: “At one level, Tagore’s ‘Shishutirtha’ had a great influence on me when I made this film. It is not a matter of adding those lines at the end. ‘Shishutirtha’ has made an appearance throughout the film in snatches of dialogue, in phrases of the music, and in some arrangements of the action. And that’s why the last three lines also become inevitable. They mean neither despair not decadence.”43 The reference to “despair” and decadence” was a rejoinder to critics who alleged that these were the prevailing mood of Subarnarekha. “I have no desire to be an artist of decadence” stated Ghatak, underscoring that “my film is the story of the present economic, political, and social crises in Bengal . . . that, in the years between 1948 and 1962, [have] come to take on monstrous proportions. The first casualty of that is our sensitivity. It has been gradually benumbed; and I wanted to strike at that.”44 Ghatak’s words recall the sentiments of romanticism. William Wordsworth, for example, had written about cultivating a “sensibility” that would jolt his contemporary public taste out of the “torpor” into which it had fallen, thanks to the tendencies of massification and modernization.45 This is not surprising since the British romantic poets were significant in the “aesthetic education” of late colonial and postcolonial Bengal. Subarnarekha, like Komal Gandhar and Meghe Dhaka Tara, was set amid the refugee crisis in Bengal. Ghatak understood a refugee as not only someone displaced from East Bengal during partition, as is generally the case in historical narratives. He argues, “Today we are all refugees having lost our vital roots in life. Elevating the expression refugee from its geographical to a more general referent has been my goal.”46 Dialogue spoken by characters like Haraprasad— “we are air-like (floating), unsupported”—or the reporter at the start of the film—“refugee! who isn’t a refugee?” referenced this general condition of homelessness. Ghatak’s move, away from the particular conditions of partition to the much more expansive theme of exile and a restless quest for home, is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Holderlin’s “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” where homecoming is no simple return to one’s home.47

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Tagore composed “Shishutirtha” (“The Child”) in 1930 during a visit to Germany.48 It is a “prose poem,” a form pioneered by Tagore whose significance will be discussed in the next section.49 A review of the poem published in the Times Literary Supplement noted: The title which Rabindranath Tagore has given to his new poem hardly suggests the wide sweep of its contents. . . . Within its twenty-one pages it embraces the whole spiritual pilgrimage of man from the darkness of confusion and strife to the light that dawned in Bethlehem. We are shown [the] pre-Christian “Man of Faith” who seeks to lead the multitude that follows him “through the night’s blindness” into the “kingdom of living light.” They inevitably refuse him in doubt and kill him in anger. For only by becoming “the great victim” can he be victorious over their hearts. Through his sacrifice their eyes are opened and they strive onwards to the goal towards which he has led them. And when they reach it and the gate opens: “The mother is seated on a straw bed/With the babe on her lap,/Like the dawn with the morning star.” Through “the new born” they understand at least the mystery of rebirth “into the ever-living.”50

Ishwar’s character has parallels with the spiritual leader of “Shishutirtha.” Like many of Ghatak’s male characters, he is a fraught and anguished personality. On the one hand, he fostered the low-caste child Abhiram when the latter’s mother, Kaushalya, was forcibly removed by state authorities to an unknown destination, a devastating plight visiting many immigrant children. On the other hand, as a Brahmin he militated against his sister Sita’s desire to marry Abhiram. He pledged support to build up the refugee colony, Navajivan (New life), in Calcutta with his friend Haraprasad, but abandoned the project to take up a job in an iron foundry in Chatimpur to give Sita a better life. Ishwar, Haraprasad, Abhiram, and Sita are all refugees who live precarious lives in conditions of scarcity in a new postcolony. At different points in the film, lines from the “Shishutirtha” prefigure the ominous fate that awaits the protagonists. For example, as Ishwar attempts suicide after Sita’s elopement, Haraprasad appears like a ghost at his window uttering the opening lines of the poem twisting them with the ironical force of his East-Bengal (Dhaka) dialect: “ ‘How far gone is the night?’ they ask, / No answer comes.” As the two friends revel in “bibhatsa mawja” (grotesque fun) in the city, more lines from the poem are quoted—“for the blind Time gropes in a maze and knows not its path or purpose.” Each citation deepens the apprehension that something terrible is going to happen in the near future. The last of the film’s intertitles (designed by artist and Ghatak’s IPTA comrade, Khaled Chowdhury) that scroll on-screen are the last lines of “Shishutirtha”: “Victory to Man, the new-born, the everliving.” Despite no real improvement in their objective conditions—Ishwar has lost his job and home—the film closes on a utopian note. Ishwar and Binu talk,

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4.2 “Victory to Man, the new-born, the ever-living.” Shishutirtha/Subarnarekha.

unrealistically, about a new home in the blue hills on the bank of the Subarnarekha River where there are “big empty rooms,” “a garden humming with butterflies,” and “Baba and Maa” ([Binu’s] dead father and mother). In looking to a new beginning, the film echoes in its last sounds Tagore’s own faith in the Upanishadic dictum choroibeti choroibeti (constant movement), this time redeeming the figure of the refugee and the homeless by seeing ceaseless movement as the human condition.

Prose Poetry: The Literary Structure of Film I now move to an analysis of a poem in the genre evolved by Tagore called gadyakabita or prose poetry. Subarnarekha, as discussed above, was inspired by a prose poem. More importantly, there are structural similarities between the prose poem and Ghatak’s films. Both use musical motifs to effect a caesura in the structure of temporality in their respective works. A song for Ghatak, like a sound-image for Tagore, infuses a sense of transcendence into the postcolonial present. The prose poem, argues Dipesh Chakrabarty, was Tagore’s literary riposte to critics who faulted his writings as romantic, idealist, and as

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lacking in realism. The poetic, Tagore answered, has the capacity to simulate bastabata (realism), drawing upon its root word bostu (object/thing), referring to the realm of daily need and necessity. It could also abruptly rupture the realm of necessity and “pierce the veil of that which is objectively real.”51 Chakrabarty illustrates this aspect of the prose poem through a reading of Tagore’s “Bansi” (The flute), that appeared in Punascha, the volume that contained “Komal Gandhar,” discussed above. There is an abrupt switch of moods between the first and second halves of “Bansi” caused by Tagore’s sudden introduction of the sound-image of a classical raga. The unexpected reference to the plaintive notes of raga sindhu-baroan wafting through the “grotesque air” of a lane in Calcutta defies the realist imperative of the first half of the poem that describes a clerk’s solitary, listless existence. The sound of the raga being played by an unknown Bengali man named Kantababu, the clerk’s neighbor, on a cornet, a European instrument that is glossed as bansi (flute) in Bengali, suddenly transforms the squalid, malodorous bylane in which the poem’s subject, Haripada, lives. With the strains of the raga, the petty clerk imagines himself as the Mughal emperor Akbar, his “broken umbrella” transforms into an “imperial parasol,” and his hopeless present merges into the celestial abode, “Vaikuntha.”52 Ghatak’s films share in this aspect of the Tagorean prose poem. This is most prominent in the song sequences whose effect is like the impact of the cornet in the aforementioned poem. “Time and again,” wrote Chidananda Dasgupta, “Ghatak’s films take us to the brink of despair, and retrieve us—often with a Tagore song” in ways that recall Tagore’s belief that “it is a sin to lose faith in man.”53 Songs in Ghatak’s films, Dasgupta noted, were “used to heighten, expand, and elevate reality to the plane of powerful emotion, extending, sometimes hyping it, in the same way as the wide-angle or the telephoto.”54 In an earlier passage in the same essay, Dasgupta commented on Ghatak’s “dramatic use of the 18mm lens,” admittedly his “favorite lens.”55 Dasgupta’s main point was that Ghatak was consistent in his method of breaking with the realist aesthetic from time to time through the deployment of camera angles and song sequences in his films. “The extreme close, the extreme wide,” observed Dasgupta, “both heighten reality and introduce theatre into cinema by ignoring realism, making it larger than life, bursting with a passion to expand beyond the limits of the medium itself, sometimes resulting in transcendence, sometimes in a kind of emotional hype as in the voiced-over songs of Suvarnarekha.”56 Dasgupta has written elsewhere about the significance of song numbers in popular Indian cinema. Some of his arguments are worth rehearsing in the context of the present discussion as they are pertinent to Indian art cinema as well. In the essay, “Why the Films Sing,” Dasgupta describes Indian popular cinema as an object in “the midst of a transition to an industrial age.” As he notes, “certain themes” such as “problems of tradition and modernity, East and

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West, city and village, family and state, feudalism and democracy, individual and society” that are “constantly explored behind the façade of entertainment” constitute the staple of Indian cinema.57 It is “only the songs” that give a “transcendental quality” to this cinema. He describes the songs as being “full of philosophy, passionately felt and ably expressed, however trite they may be in their generalizations.”58 The song turned “the present tense of the camera eye into the past and the future.” Aside from providing philosophical expositions, the song “proposes inductive and deductive syllogisms on the truths of individual life in relation to the social universe; explains hidden meanings; comments, like a chorus, on the worth or consequences of an action, besides providing aural enchantment to the otherwise music-less urban world at its rural grassroots.”59 While there is much to quarrel with in Dasgupta’s description of popular cinema as being rather like a “variety show of disparate elements rather than a unified whole” born in the midst of “clashes of faith” that were “unable to come to terms with a technological mode of apprehending reality” there remains something important to retrieve and take forward in his observation that “what gives this form its only significant core is the song.”60 His subsequent lines affirm the general point on which this chapter converges about the song as a medium that is apart from and yet within the film. He writes, “Belonging to a different cultural level from the rest of the film, dismissing the demands of dramatic continuity and defying the inbuilt realism of the medium, the song acquires an autonomous presence rising above the disparateness of the other elements in a film. . . . There is a tacit agreement between the filmmaker and the viewer that the song is for transcendence.”61 By what means does the song achieve this “transcendence” from the medium that contains it to become something autonomous? While he repeatedly remarks on this feature, Dasgupta does not push this key insight into the role of the song in Indian cinema far enough. In the following analysis, I explore how songs denote time and the politically charged aesthetics that result from such denotation. I have written elsewhere about how select song sequences from popular Hindi cinema in its golden age—the 1950s—establish a hybrid, pan-Indian “present” in which the newly anointed citizen-subject asserts her claims on a postcolonial commons through a creative appropriation of Indian pasts.62 In Ghatak’s films, by comparison, the song, though similarly resistant to a developmental or historicist sense of time, was often provoked by the dystopic aspect of the present. Much like their popular counterparts, these songs too evoke heterotemporality as a means of distancing themselves from the time of the film’s narrative. The play with time makes the songs, unlike the films that contain them, stand out as radical instances of antihistoricism. They defy the logic that “tells us that in order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must

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see it as an historically evolving entity, that is, first as an individual and unique whole—as some kind of unity in potential—and second, as something that develops over time.”63 In Ghatak’s film, the song collapses many temporalities and sensibilities, creating a utopian affect that is not tied to a capitalist utopia of plenty and abundance. Rather, the utopia they evoke is eternal, harking toward mythical times.64 Situated in the present marked by severe want and scarcity, they offer momentary release that makes the present livable. Songs thus become a political-aesthetic resource for inhabiting the present. Readers will recall Shankar practicing the majestic monsoon raga miyan ki malhar on his tanpura in Meghe Dhaka Tara. The regal notes of the raga are a devastating contrast with Shankar’s hole-riddled vest that Ghatak makes sure we do not miss as the camera follows the single stream of light coming through the makeshift walls into the room and across Shankar’s back. Or the release experienced from bitter quarrels among troupe members when Rishi sings the Tagore song, “Akash Bhora Surja Tara” (The sun and the stars fill up the sky) in Komal Gandhar. The song, a favorite of Anasuya’s mother, writes Dudley Andrew, “literally ‘moves’ Anasuya, transports her into a utopia where she appears momentarily sheltered.”65 Sita sings another regal rendition of the malhar raga in her ramshackle Calcutta hovel, transporting herself (and us), if only for the duration of the song, into another realm. So, too, when she sings the Tagore song “Dhaner Khete Roudro Chhayay Lukochuri Khela” (Sunlight and shade play hide and seek in the paddy field) to her son on a night of torrential rain in the slum to conjure for him the land of their “new home.” The power of these moments owes to their ability to summon up a present—“listen and you will see,” Sita tells Binu—that we hear and feel on our skin but do not see in the frame. Writing about a slum in a very different context, Saidiya Hartman notes how “everything is in short supply except sensation. The experience is too much.”66 The present conjured in Ghatak’s song-times is a defiance of a reality that is too much to bear. The song-time nullifies the real by evoking instead an excess of sensation that transports characters in the film through the song to a nowhere. Song-times are not a culmination of the empty, homogenous time of history, but a conjoining of a multiplicity of affective temporalities: of myths and of gods, and pasts and futures. In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on two song sequences from Meghe Dhaka Tara.

Song Times and Queer Futures Meghe Dhaka Tara has a total of five musical interludes: two classical Indian ragas, one rabindrasangeet, and two folk songs. One of the latter belongs to the genre of baul songs.67 The other is associated with the last day (bijaya) in  the five-day Bengali festival, Durga puja (a celebration of Durga, the

4.3 Above, Sita singing malhar raga, in a ramshackle Calcutta slum, Subarnarekha; below, “Listen and you will see”; Sita, Binu, and new home.

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mother-goddess). It is to this one that I turn my attention first in order to analyze the role played by songs in Ghatak’s deployment of archetype and mythology, two subjects he regarded as central to his understanding of Indian cinema, history, and culture. I then move to the rabindrasangeet that actually takes place before the folk song and prefigures it. This analysis will illuminate the vital place of the song sequence in the art film’s apprehension of postcolonial temporality. They offer a parallax view of history through the creation of their own aesthetic universe that suddenly opens up within the narrative world of the film. A few explanatory remarks will help in explaining the context of the songs. The plot of Meghe Dhaka Tara, briefly alluded to in chapter 1, revolves around a family evicted from east Bengal (then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) trying to eke out a living in a refugee colony in Calcutta. It consists of Nita, the protagonist; her father, an idealistic ex-schoolteacher who spouts Wordsworth and Yeats and is uncomfortable about his sons earning a livelihood through manual labor, seen as demeaning to the Bengali middle-class householder, and her anxious, poverty-hardened, and worldly mother. Nita has three siblings: two brothers—Montu, whose skills in soccer gets him a job in a factory, and Shankar, who aspires to be a classical singer and eventually succeeds—and a narcissistic and flirtatious younger sister, Gita. Nita, who is described at one point in the film as “Sindbad the sailor,” goes to great lengths to satisfy the desires and wants of the entire family. So dependent are they on her labors that the mother connives to have Gita married off to Nita’s long-time suitor, Sanat, so as not to lose the money Nita earns from her job. Beaten down by the lack of care and a poverty that is exacerbated by a series of accidents suffered by the father and Montu, Nita succumbs to tuberculosis. In the essay, “Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts,” Ghatak observed that all great art produces “aesthetic relish” that courses through it in “multiple layers.”68 At the primary level of the narrative, there are incidents that give rise to joy, sorrow, laughter, and other emotions. If one goes deeper there are “political and social connotations at play.”69 Probing further takes the viewer to “philosophical insights” and into the heart of the “artist’s self-reflection.” And finally there are those “momentary feelings that cannot be expressed in words . . . moments [that] take him close to something unknowable.”70 “At this point,” argued Ghatak, art “has a lot in common with divine worship.” The latter in turn “is concerned with worldly transactions with the gods at the first level, while at its deepest point lies the ineffable.”71 This arc of thinking about the ways that mythohistorical factors molded the contemporary came from Ghatak’s reading of comparative mythology and the concept of the archetype. His films’ temporalities are shot through with mythical, otherworldly times. “Myth—and therefore civilization,” he noted, citing Joseph Campbell, “is a poetic, super-normal image, conceived like all poetry

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in depth, but susceptible [to] interpretation on various levels. The shallowest minds see in it the local scenery: the deepest the foreground of the void.”72 Like Campbell, Ghatak, too, was one in a long “line of twentieth century artists and critics who came under the influence of C. G. Jung.” Moinak Biswas observes that the notion of the archetype, so central to Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious, served as a “useful tool for him to formulate and explain his method of what, in an Eisensteinian vein, he called ‘throwing overtones’ in his films.”73 We witness a repeated return to the archetype of the mother in Ghatak’s cinema. A central figure in Hindu mythology, here is what he had to say about it: “This Great Mother continues to haunt the consciousness of many races in the world. It has two aspects—the one promising benediction, the Sophia, and the other striking terror, much like the goddess Kali or Chandi. Our Puranas have visualized this deity in the two forms as part of a single entity in the ‘Devisukta.’ And this mother archetype has penetrated our society in its every pore. All the songs of Agamani and Bijaya from Bengal, the deeper aspects of our folktales, bear witness to this.”74 The preeminence of this archetype, a central component in the Bengali collective unconscious, “has a crucial role to play in the methods of filmmaking.”75 Expanding its scope he went so far as to assert that this unconscious happened “to be the pan-Indian aspect of our cinema, setting the criteria against which films should be ultimately measured.”76 Referring to Meghe Dhaka Tara in the same essay, Ghatak observed, “The Uma symbology used there should be clear. . . . I conceived her as a symbol of the daughters married off as part of the tradition of ‘gauridaan’ [gift of a childdaughter] for centuries in Bengali households. She is born on the day the goddess Jagaddhatri is worshipped. And she dies as she is united with the hills, which stand for Mahakaal [lit. Great-time, or an embodiment of Time itself]. When the first hint of her death comes through her tuberculosis, unknown voices start singing the lament of Menaka heard during Bijaya.”77 This is the first song I consider. It develops over multiple sequences, with the fullest version occurring in the scene described below. It takes place soon after Shankar returns from Bombay as a successful singer and discovers that his beloved sister, Nita, is ill. Meanwhile Gita, the younger sister now married to Sanat, is back in their paternal home expecting her first child. Citing the baby’s health as the reason, the father walks into Nita’s room during a night of torrential rain and lightning and asks her to leave the house. Other family members fear that her infection could affect the baby’s health. Although stricken by the decision, the father nonetheless carries out the family’s verdict in the interest of the future, the soon-to-be-born child. “You were successful,” he tells her, his voice dripping with irony, for he knows that Nita bore the burden of the entire family on her fragile shoulders. But now, he declares in utter helplessness, she has been reduced to a “burden” herself. “They are dreaming of a

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two-storey [house],” he mutters, referring to the mother’s expressing of an earlier wish for a bigger and better house to Shankar. They believe that “your breath contains poison.” As Nita picks up her spare belongings, that prominently includes a framed photograph of her and Shankar taken in the hills, the plaintive notes of the song begin to play. Unlike other songs we have heard thus far in Meghe Dhaka Tara, the lyrics of this one—Aye lo Uma kole loi (come to my lap, dear Uma)—are indistinct. Even so, we can tell, and as Ghatak’s statement above also makes clear, it is a song meant for Uma (another name for the goddess Durga) being beckoned by her mother Menaka to leave her marital home and visit her parents. Agamani and bijaya songs—“the former sung in anticipation of Uma’s coming and the latter in grief over her departure”78—have a long tradition in Bengal, dating back at least three hundred years. As argued by Rachel McDermott, from the eighteenth century onward there developed a tradition of the composition of songs and poems devoted to Kali, Uma, and Durga, who were considered different aspects of the mother goddess in the vernacular Bengali language (as opposed to the courtly language of Sanskrit). Renowned authors such as Ramprasad Sen and Kamalakanta Bhattacharya wrote songs about Kali, while her softer and gentler counterpart Uma received the attention of many lesserknown figures. In Bhattacharya’s works, “Menaka’s piteous pleas for her daughter’s safe return at the autumnal Puja Festival, Uma’s marital problems with her husband Siva in Kailasa, and the events of her three-day reunion with her parents in the Himalayan kingdom provide ample scope for artistry.”79 Ghatak’s use of an Uma-sangeet at this climactic moment in the film recalls this long history of goddess devotion in Bengal, but also serves to turn that tradition on its head by demonstrating the abuse suffered by one aspect of the goddess, Uma/Nita. Ironically, much of the abuse comes from “Gita . . . the sensual woman [and] their mother [who] represent . . . the cruel aspect.”80 Nita, Gita, and their mother are each different aspects of the archetype of the mother goddess. Their respective dispositions provide the driving motive of the film. Apart from the irony inherent in playing an Uma-sangeet for a consumptive woman who shall die a spinster, Ghatak is also commenting on the continuing cruelty of a tradition that once practiced gauridaan. Gauri in Bengal refers to the eight-year-old girl child; Rohini, to a nine-year-old. According to the sixteenth-century smarta Raghunandana, these were the most auspicious years in which to marry off a daughter, before she began to menstruate between the age of ten and twelve.81 Ghatak remarked elsewhere on the enthusiastic adoption of the practice of marrying off the girl child, thereby separating her from “familiar playground[s]” and forcing upon her a future in “an unknown village, an unknown home, where the frowning faces around her would frighten her, and she would hanker for her own home.”82 The modern conditions of

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scarcity and want in an urban, postcolonial, refugee colony culminated in a different gauridaan for Nita that was no less cruel, but also more ambiguous. In the essay, “My Thoughts on Cinema,” Ghatak described Meghe Dhaka Tara as an “ambitious film, because I was working with a universal theme. Bengal of the past seven or eight hundred years had produced something that was essentially Bengali. The mother-complex-ridden Bengali society adopted the tradition of gauridaan or child marriage.” The fear of leaving for a new household was also always accompanied by “nostalgia” for the parental home. “Our folklore is full of this. The same pain rings in our Durga puja, this is why Durga is a daughter to us . . . (and) autumn is a season of nostalgia to us.”83 Born on the day of jagaddhatri puja, Nita leaves home during the Umasangeet clutching a small bundle of belongings. Most prominently displayed in these is the cherished photograph taken in the hills of her and Shankar. Shankar, another name for the god Shiva, takes her to a sanatorium in Shillong where she will die. Death and Shankar unite Nita, the contemporary Durga, with the mountains and “Mahakaal.” The latter, notes Biswas, not only “means time and eternity, but also the Lord of Time and Death, in this case Shiva.”84 History and myth are sutured in the fractured archetype of Nita as Uma/Durga/ Jagaddhatri in the film to indict contemporary society. But Nita’s departure from home with Shankar and into death in the hills also remains an unexplored queer horizon in Ghatak’s filmic imagination. The implications of Shankar/ Shiva, brother/husband, and desire/destiny are left unresolved. Insofar as the song sequence merges the “time of history” and the “time of gods,” it forces the viewer to acknowledge the irony of the goddess Uma in the very human and “modern” working girl, Nita.85 But, it also intimates queer futures whose scope could not be fully worked out in the film’s present. The braiding of mythical and historical time in both the Uma-sangeet and the earlier rabindrasangeet is formally rendered with shots of Nita’s face in a series of tight, frontal close-ups. The gleam in her eyes, her curly hair streaming down her shoulders, and her upward gaze are reminiscent of Durga idols as they are immersed in the holy Ganges after the festival. The significance of the inclusion of such mythic and folk elements in Indian art cinema has been discussed earlier. Here, I want to underscore the importance of the song—a central characteristic of Indian cinema—in conveying the historical, mythical, and queer dimensions of Nita’s destiny. During the Uma-sangeet, Nita’s visage carries the signs of her fatal illness, splatters of blood instead of the vermillion (on the parting of the hair and on the forehead) that would have been the sign of a Hindu woman’s marital status. As she picks up the childhood photograph of herself with Shankar in the hills, her desire to return to that spot of childhood bliss is established—but in this instance it will be a final union with Mahakaal. The song is the site for the enactment of Nita’s physical and psychic

4.4 Above, A consumptive Nita as the modern Uma, Meghe Dhaka Tara; below, Nita

with her childhood photograph.

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longing. Its indistinct lyrics are reminiscent of Michel Chion’s discussion of borders and film sounds. The wailing, reverberating quality of this song— onscreen and nondiegetic—wrenches viewers out of the scene’s spatiotemporal context into a mythopoeic realm.86 We have a premonition of Nita’s fate in the earlier rabindrasangeet that she requested Shankar teach her on the eve of her sister’s upcoming bashor (wedding night). Sung as a duet (by playback artists Debabrata Biswas and Gita Ghatak), these lyrics invoke a stormy night: The night my doors were shattered by the storm you came into my abode unbeknownst to me. Everything went dark as the light of the lamp was extinguished, I reached for the sky, though I knew not for whom I lay in the dark thinking it was a dream. Little did I know that the storm was your pennant! When morning came I looked up to find you standing before me On the chest of the emptiness that engulfed my room.87

Even as the storm plunges her home into darkness and destroys her shelter, it leaves her, paradoxically, in a state of plenitude. In the first light of the morning, it dawns upon the singer that the storm has heralded the victorious arrival of a greater being. This realization transforms the emptiness of her abode into fullness; full of emptiness itself, thus turning emptiness into a substance. The lines—“When the morning came / I looked up to find you standing before me”—prefigure Nita’s death later in the film. The “you” in the above lines refer to a nonidolatrous, formless being analogous to the supreme deity of the Brahmo faith, of which Tagore was a follower. The rabindrasangeet transforms the figure of the refugee from a condition of abjectness into which the narrative hurled her into a repository of jouissance—“a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law.”88 For most of the song, the two figures of Nita and Shankar are shown in a long shot sitting next to one another in a darkened room. Except for a brief moment they do not look at one another. Each is intensely focused on the song, its enunciation, and meanings. Their respective gazes convey pain and help us focus on the feelings evoked by the song. As the last lines occur, Nita’s face is shown in an extreme close-up, tilted upwards. The dramatic overture invoked by the close-up is heightened as it coincides with the lyrics of the song dissolving into sounds of whiplash as if to reflect the repeated assaults upon her by her loved ones. As I have observed in chapter 1, this manner of framing the female face, tilted and looking upward in a manner reminiscent of Hindu idol immersion, would become Ghatak’s signature. In Meghe Dhaka

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Tara, the lyrics of the Uma-sangeet and rabindrasangeet combined with the close-ups of Nita’s face bearing expressions that alternate between acute pain, manic joy, and unspeakable longings, have the effect of merging mythic, contemporary, and queer times. Like Tagore’s prose poem, not only do the songs rupture the narrative time of the film’s diegesis, but they also possess politically transformative potential by jolting the viewer into an awareness of the  difference between the times evoked in the song and the time of the narrative.

Cinema, Poetry, and Global Art Cinema In considering Ghatak’s trilogy through the literary genre of the prose poem, I have found it useful to think with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notion of the “cinema of poetry.” In his essay, “Il cinema di poesia,” Pasolini adapted from literature into film the device of “free indirect discourse” or the “free indirect point of view” that accentuated the subjective point of view of a character in “objective prose narratives.”89 It is an interesting conjuncture of global film history that several important filmmakers, Ghatak and Pasolini among them, posited an organic relationship between cinema and poetry at the same historical moment. In a recent essay, Dudley Andrew links Ghatak and Pasolini through the notion of a cinema of poetry. Andrew writes, channeling Pasolini, “Only a filmmaker who shares a class with a character . . . can adopt a point of view taken alongside that of the character whose story he narrates. We might say that while the auteur’s camera doesn’t become the eye of the character, it “accompanies” her, taking on the character’s vision and generalizing it. As Antonioni does with Monica Vitti (especially as Giuliana in The Red Desert) or as Flaubert did with Emma Bovary, so Ghatak looks out at Supriya Choudhury’s world alongside her, seeing beyond her but from the perspective of her class and its plight.”90 In Pasolini’s cinema of poetry, similarly, P. Adams Sitney notes, “the subjective perspective does not correspond to the point-of-view shot of earlier cinema but to a range of rhetorical tropes indirectly linking the whole film to the perspective of its protagonist.”91 The “free indirect point of view” achieved the effect of an internal monologue of a character in literature but is not identical to it as there is no cinematic equivalent of the linguistic means by which a writer expressed a character’s inner thoughts and feelings.92 The song functions as such a “styleme” in Ghatak’s films. “If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style immediately, the rhymes and all that: you see the language [lingua] as an instrument, or you count the syllables of a verse. The equivalent of what you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinema text, through the stylemes, i.e., through the camera movements and the montage. So to make films is to be a poet.”93

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Although situated in the middle of everyday life in the postcolonial nation, Ghatak’s songs enable his characters (and the viewer watching them) to inhabit a time that escapes the developmental history of modernization and the permanently divided nation state. The films’ narratives could well remain within this account of transition. But the songs, by conjoining rhythm, image, language, and cadence, became an affective medium of contemporary Indian lives separate from that narrative. In this, they offered a script of the libidinal economy of postcolonial India. No wonder that Ghatak wrote, “I always insist that melody and music as such have a place in films, in their own right.”94 If the films’ narratives reflected a postpartition reality that was a blocked dialectic of history with no resolution in sight, the songs marked a rejection of that history as incapable of bearing hope.

Afterlives Ghatak did not live to enjoy the wide recognition of his work. He was not as well-traveled as Sen and Ray. Indeed, he never left India except briefly during the making of Titas. He did not have the honor of serving on jury panels at international festivals, and few of his films were exhibited outside India. Retrospectives of his work only began posthumously, from the early 1980s. They have continued since then at frequent intervals. A couple of his films have been remastered. The documentary Amar Lenin (My Lenin, 1970) that was not cleared for exhibition by the Censor Board of India, has recently become available. Meghe Dhaka Tara, the only film that did well during his lifetime, and Titas are now part of the Criterion collection. A volume on Meghe Dhaka Tara is now part of BFI film classics. Inspired by Ghatak’s works, director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee directed a film called Meghe Dhaka Tara (2013) and Moinak Biswas created a video installation, Across the Burning Tracks (2016), for the Shanghai Biennale. That Ghatak continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers, film scholars, and cinephiles is undisputed and unsurprising. But during my research for this book I was startled by a little-known poem that I happened upon entitled “Meghe Dhaka Tara.” Readers of contemporary Bengali poetry will know its author, Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay (1958–). To the best of my knowledge, she was not a film society activist. She has written another poem called “Subarnarekha” that was published in 2003 in the Bengali daily, Ajkal. “Meghe Dhaka Tara” appeared in an anthology in a section entitled “Celluloid.”95 “Meghe Dhaka Tara,” the short, thirteen-line poem, addressed to Shankar, Nita’s older brother, seemed to me to be the most appropriate way of closing this discussion on Ghatak’s trilogy, songs, and the possibility of hope in the despairing time of the postcolonial present. I present my translation of the poem below:

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I too want to be a swan’s trumpet, dada, only give me a yojana of empty space96 That night when all doors shattered in the storm I gazed into the morning To find the mute women’s colony washed away by their wedding night song The more I try to secure him with a safety pin That errant sandal slips off my foot Do you remember, dada, How even as a child I wanted to grab the black moon? One step after the next I walked And arrived on the side of this mountain. It is an abyss! The swan seeks a breeze. The breeze blows harder Into this night when all doors will shatter As the brother cradles his tanpura-sister on his lap

Articulating a realm of queer desire, the voice in this poem belongs to the poet, Nita, and a radical Bengali feminist who dares to claim that which was forbidden to her. The swan’s trumpet recalls the hamsadhvani raga with which Ghatak’s film, Meghe Dhaka Tara, commenced. But it also evokes Nita’s ability to sing, a skill she snuffed out (like the rest of her) in order to support her refugee family. During her short-lived adult life, and until she was banished from the intimacy of her home, she nurtured Shankar’s dream to become a classical singer. She also cherished a desire to return to the hills she shared in the framed photograph of her and Shankar. The poem’s Nita picks up where the film’s dead protagonist left us with the opening words “I [too] want.” Nita in 1960 died, crying, “I want to live.” The reverberations of her cry from the hills of Shillong seem to have finally reached the plains of Bengal. Nita today can speak (and write) her forbidden desires. She who once sang “the night my doors were shattered by the storm” to assuage her pain on the eve of her sister Gita’s wedding can today gaze into the morning after the wedding night and declare that the colony of “mute” women will be washed away by the disorder unleashed by their duet. Sanat, her one-time love interest, is about as reliable as the broken sandal she tried in vain to secure with a safety pin. She asks “dada”—her older brother, Shankar—if he remembers that even as a child she desired impossible things like a black moon. Having trudged one step at a time to the edge of the mountain, Nita has discovered that she is facing an abyss. Now the cloud-capped star wants to be a swan who will soar into the night through the gale whose force will shatter all doors. As

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destruction reigns outside, “dada” will cradle his sister lovingly on his lap like his tanpura. In his insightful commentary on the trilogy, Biswas draws attention to Ghatak’s compulsive focus on the brother-sister bond.97 This was very likely a way of registering his resistance to the bourgeois order of the developmental nation-state and its social reproduction through the nuclear family and heterosexual couple. Unable to legitimately realize, let alone articulate, their desire for forbidden relationships, Ghatak’s women succumb to the incredible pressures of socioeconomic life in the postcolony. Only Anasuya survives in Komal Gandhar. She is united with Bhrigu, who she had once hailed as “her mother’s son,” even though he is not related to her by blood. Their union, readers will recall, put an end to the strife between the two theater groups and stands for the utopian (and thus unrealizable) union of the two Bengals. Unsurprisingly songs, Ghatak’s chosen means to signal a politics of hope in postcolonial life, accompanied that union. Many years later Nita returns in Bengali feminist poetry, bursting with anarchic energy. Empowered by song and her own voice, she offers new imaginations of the present in which there may be what novelist Arundhati Roy subversively called different “love laws,” new ways to express desire and constitute affiliations. The song of the cloud-capped star emerges in the twenty-first century with visions of queer times and new futures.98

CHAPTER 5

“ANGER AND AFTER” History, Political Cinema, and Mrinal Sen

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fter the critically acclaimed Hindi-language Bhuvan Shome, Mrinal Sen returned to Bengali cinema with three films: Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1972), and Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter, 1973) set in and about his native city Kolkata. The figure of an angry, young, Bengali male youth at its core, Sen’s Calcutta trilogy opens up ways for thinking about cinema amid a maelstrom of leftist politics and violence in West Bengal, Sen’s home state, and other parts of India. The films foregrounded the radical Marxist and Maoist political leanings of the youth of the day. Tempting though it is to see them as a mirror of the city during the turbulent period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, I argue, was far more ambitious in scope. Through the medium of fiction film, the director presents us with his unique reading of twentieth-century Indian history that culminated in the tumultuous postcolonial present.1 Understudied and largely forgotten except by avid Bengali cineastes, this trilogy, with its historicizing impulse, offers insights into political cinema, a category that is often used in the commentarial literature to make sense of this period.2 Many critics, especially those with leftist political inclinations, judged the trilogy on its representation of the worldview of politically radical youth of the day and on how efficaciously the films mirrored contemporary political aspirations and conditions. In contrast, I analyze the trilogy as Sen’s sovereign project of crafting history. I revisit the three films to delineate the genealogy of contemporary anger that Sen offered as a key to his interpretation of twentiethcentury Indian history. To undertake this task, I also focus on the polarized

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reception of these films. Juxtaposing their reception to the films’ accounts of the past, present, and future enables us to understand the meanings of political cinema in pre-Emergency India.

Introducing the Calcutta Trilogy Sen’s trilogy was a far cry from the bildungsroman of a boy becoming a man presented in Ray’s Apu films. Set in a Calcutta inflamed by a violent Maoist movement, the films variously featured a young, Bengali, male protagonist. Markedly different from Ray’s Apu, these figures signal the arrival of a new historical moment of precarity, one that has locked the protagonists into a dreadful and agonizing present without any possibility of a future. These are young men whose student days ended not too long ago. But they have little prospect of gainful employment. The trilogy chronicles the death of their hopes for an ordinary life of middle-class flourishing and a present filled with unending “surplus time” due to unemployment.3 The city plays a critical role in this account. Calcutta by the late 1960s already resembled a “planet of slums” with the vast influx of rural populations and refugees.4 Caught in a gridlock of political strife, corruption, and violence, the city is depicted as a force that blocked all avenues of growth and development for youth. In conjoining anger with youth, Sen’s Calcutta trilogy arguably marked the first on-screen appearance of the figure of the angry young man in Indian cinema. Authoritative studies of the “angry young man” have analyzed this trope through the star persona of Amitabh Bachchan in popular Hindi cinema. Ranjani Mazumdar offers the most nuanced study of this phenomenon, seeing in it a concatenation of varied influences: a troubled relationship with the mother, recalling the character of Karna in the Indian epic, Mahabharata; Bachchan’s ability to distill, through his brooding on-screen image and distinctive voice, both the past of youth in small-town India and a future in an urban metropolis such as Bombay; a channeling of the anger and desire for revenge in youth in the pre-Emergency city “where the hopes and yearnings unleashed by the promise of nationalism are either fulfilled or dashed.”5 Coincidentally, the last film of the Calcutta trilogy Padatik released in 1973, the same year that Bachchan incarnated the angry young man in popular Hindi cinema through his role as Vijay Khanna in Zanjeer (Chains, Prakash Mehra, 1973). But Sen’s angry young men have little in common with Bachchan’s numerous “Vijay” characters. While the rest of this chapter traces their genealogy, it suffices to note here that Sen’s youth are marked by a striking absence of revenge toward a single individual or entity. Nor were they fueled by a sense of injury to family that is almost always represented as a good in itself in popular Hindi films. While both figures speak to the lifeworld of Indian youth in the years leading up to the

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Emergency in 1975, Sen’s protagonists carry the burden of leftist ideology. They lack the heroic charisma and superhuman powers displayed by Bachchan. They are neither an antihero such as the smuggler in Deewar (The Wall, Yash Chopra, 1975) nor the remarkably honest police officer in Zanjeer. For Sen, “youth,” rather than representing a stage in the growth of an individual, is a permanent condition for the possibility of the birth of political anger. Anger—a generalized feeling rather than directed at a single individual or group—is their only response, and we see a profusion of it on-screen. It is perhaps to flag the systemic role of the city and to explain the rage generated among its (male) youth just from living in it that Sen chose to feature it in the title of the second film in the trilogy, Calcutta 71. What is the significance of a cultural object whose title consists of a date and place? Literature scholar James Chandler, in his magisterial study of British romanticism in which Shelley’s “England in 1819” plays a pivotal role, wonders “Under what circumstances do we consider literary texts as representatives of specific cultures (as opposed to, say, ‘life,’ ‘the world,’ or ‘human cultures’)?” In Chandler’s analysis, “England in 1819” bespoke a “British historicism” that arose “from a distinctively British position in then-contemporary world culture.”6 Sen’s trilogy, too, historicized a particular place, Calcutta, at a particular moment in time. Yet Calcutta was always seen in the context of an international history of the Left. As he clarified in conversations, Calcutta presented Sen with a “mirror” with which to view the conditions prevailing in India and other parts of the postcolonial global South.7 In approaching the city as the site that reflected conditions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America more generally, Sen marked a self-conscious distance from not only the works of his peers such as Ray and Ghatak, but also a long tradition of Bengali literature. Sen’s trilogy coincided with a set of three films by Ray that also centered on the city and a male protagonist, films that are the focus of the last chapter. Contemporaries saw the output of both filmmakers comparatively, as did Sen himself. For example, he recalled how he deliberately inserted certain dialogues in Interview to distinguish his protagonist from Ray’s in The Adversary.8 In a semiautobiographical and evocatively argued essay entitled “In the City,” Supriya Chaudhuri writes, “I saw Pratidwandi (The Adversary) and Mrinal Sen’s Interview on the same day in 1970, the first at a special press preview in a film studio in Tollygunge, and the second, released that day, at a cinema hall in Bhavanipur.”9 In sharp contrast to Ray, where the “humanist illusion of character” invoked the viewers’ sympathy with the protagonist, Sen’s trilogy in Chaudhuri’s reading placed “us at a certain distance from what it represented: . . . what we see is offered to us as object-lesson, as history, as text.”10 Taking this observation as a starting point, I explore the ways in which Sen communicated this “object-lesson” and “history.” What was the nature of the texts he offered us? The narrative structures of the three films are varied.

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That they hold together as a trilogy is due both to certain deliberate formal strategies and to Sen’s synthesis of the narratives to make a larger historical argument. All three films have shots featuring important landmarks of Calcutta— Calcutta University, High Court, Dalhousie Square, All India Radio, the Victoria Memorial, the racecourse—as well as documentary and still footage of local and global events. Shots of popular Hindi and Bengali film posters, newspaper headlines, statues of imperial and nationalist leaders, processions and picketing, police firings on political protestors, images of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietcong, and African soldiers are also common to all three films. They situate postcolonial Calcutta against a background of global protest movements in other parts of Afro-Asia and Latin America. Likewise, a profusion of techniques made popular by filmic new waves and cinema verité— freeze-frames, jerky camera movements, interviews, and montages using stills and documentary footage, which Sen had been shooting on Calcutta streets from 1969—create a sense of continuity in viewers who watch all three films. Actual narrative continuity was emphasized with the second and third films in the trilogy referencing the earlier ones. Thus, the early courtroom scene in Calcutta 71 is actually a parodic sequence that picks up where Interview left off. Padatik likewise opens with a shot of a young man being chased down lanes of the city, a clear reference to a similar fugitive figure in Calcutta 71. More than any of the above, however, the coherence of the trilogy was a consequence of Sen’s organically constructed, programmatic argument about anger and its aftermath. Seen thus, the films, though situated in the present, actually cover a longer temporal span and possess a unity that prevailed over their episodic nature. Sen’s trilogy, unlike Ray’s Apu trilogy, is not the history of the becoming of an individual. Its focus is an emotion—anger—and its history that manifests itself in different characters but is cathected on to the body of the ordinary citizen as the dominant feature of politics. Sen maps the trajectory of this emotion and invites intellectual scrutiny of its politics over the course of the three films. It is necessary to delve into the films—their plots, structure, directorial commentary, and reception—in some detail to get a sense of how these strategies work. In this chapter, as in the rest of this book, I am attentive to Sen’s statements as well as those by critics, especially film society members. Sen, much like his contemporaries Ray and Ghatak, wrote constantly about cinema: his own films, formal aspects of filmmaking, and works of other filmmakers both national and international. The world of Indian art cinema was networked by film societies: their journals, debates, and screenings. Sen’s trilogy, in particular, evoked a storm of commentary and criticism, and many film clubs devoted entire special issues to the three films that provide an invaluable resource for this analysis.

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Interview Interview, based on a story by Ashish Burman, is a satirical film about a single day in the life of a young, rather pedestrian Bengali man, Ranjit, that ends with an extraordinary twist. Employed at a small press in Calcutta, Ranjit manages to land a job interview through his late father’s friend at a private Scottish company in the city. Such firms continued to do business well after the transfer of power in 1947 and offered higher salaries and better perks than government enterprises. Ranjit’s travails through the day as he tries to procure a suit, the designated attire for the job interview, constitute the main storyline of Interview. His unlucky reversals begin with a strike by laundry workers that prevents him from collecting his own suit from the dry cleaners. He borrows one from a well-to-do friend, but leaves it behind on a crowded bus where an attempted pickpocket of a copassenger distracts him. A futile police interrogation follows. Sen reveals the soulless nature of bureaucracy through the police officer’s interrogation of Ranjit where, ignoring his pleas that he has a job interview, a barrage of irrelevant questions are thrown his way. Unable to find a suit, Ranjit appears for the interview in ‘native’ garb, a dhoti and kurta. His benefactor visits the family in the early evening to berate Ranjit for appearing like a “clown” before the interview panel and excoriates his mother for failing to discipline her “incorrigible” son. This scolding is the first time in the film that Ranjit’s behavior, attitudes, and conduct are made to stand in for something larger than him. “Incorrigible” was a shorthand by which the family friend was in effect criticizing, in a summary fashion, the attitudes of a large segment of youth who desired things in life but seemed unwilling, at least in their elders’ censorious gaze, to put in the requisite effort to achieve them. A cut from the family friend’s diatribe into a “conversation” between a visibly agitated Ranjit and an imaginary audience offers an insight into the youth response. Viewers will recall that there is a similar moment of direct address earlier in the film when Ranjit speaks to an off-screen audience. In that instance, more playful in tone than the above, Ranjit is shown aboard a tram. In cinema verité style, the sequence unfolds as follows: Ranjit glances at an image of himself in a  popular film magazine, Ulta Rath, which a copassenger is reading. As if addressing a bewildered viewer, Ranjit owns up to the correspondence between the protagonist of the film and the printed image of the film actor by announcing that he, Ranjit Mallick, is the professional Bengali film actor. He is an ordinary actor, not a “star,” who is being “followed” by the director Mrinal Sen. The latter has persuaded him that a day in Ranjit’s life would make for an engaging film. A shot of Sen’s cinematographer, K. K. Mahajan, with his ARRI IIC camera followed by off-camera voice shouting “Cut!” establishes that this is a film. Ranjit assures us that everything we have witnessed so far in the narrative—his

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job at a small press, his home in the neighborhood of Bhavanipur, and his upcoming interview—were “real.” Although Karuna Banerjee (of Pather Panchali fame),11 who was playing his mother in the film was an “actress,” all the feelings she is shown experiencing in the movie were just like those of his “real” mother. He emphasizes the humdrum texture of his life by sharing other details of his family and work.12 As if giving voice to the sentiments of the viewer, discombobulated by this strange turn of on/off-screen events, another passenger in the tram mutters, “Is this cinema? This is more a story of my life, your life.” Sen appears to be making a larger point about his cinematic practice in this sequence. Good cinema, he seems to suggest, did not have to be wedded to established realist protocols whose notable example in the Indian case was Ray’s Apu trilogy. His invocation of the “real” goes against such protocols and gestures toward an aesthetic that reveals its organic relationship to the ordinary in a disjunctive manner. Despite critical dismissals of these interludes as “gimmicks,”13 Sen, who admired techniques associated with the French nouvelle vague and Brechtian theater, was working to evolve a form where the cinema “is not an art which films life” but is “something between life and art.” Unlike the tram scene, the later sequence featured a conversation between Ranjit and a disembodied voice. Having followed Ranjit all day, the voice now goaded him by asking if he was not disappointed by his failure to secure the job. It did not let up when Ranjit refused to own up to his disappointment. “[You] wanted more than double of what you are getting now. . . . Plus commission . . . you wanted to change your condition, [you wanted] . . . happiness, . . . wealth, material possessions, prosperity.” The incidents of the day—laundry strike, pickpocket—are rehearsed during this argument. Ranjit by now is smarting at the unfairness of the day, the arbitrary events stacked as if to ruin his modest desire for a better life. The voice drives home this last point when it asks, “If you had been able to arrange for a suit could any scoundrel have denied you the job?” These jarring interludes destroy feelings of immediate sympathy and identification between viewers and the protagonist by deliberately puncturing narrative continuity. Indeed, they are designed to make us weigh in on the ethics of such identification. Both conversations are followed with scenes of political protests in the city and elsewhere. As viewers, we also wonder about the identity of the voice. It belongs to Sen, who was following Ranjit “from dawn to dusk.” But Sen is also ventriloquizing as an imaginary audience. The voice functions like a chorus in a play mirroring the psychological processes of the protagonist. By unsuturing narrative continuity, the conversation with the disembodied voice foils identification with the on-screen character even as it repeatedly reminds us that there is an element of the “real” in the on-screen drama. More importantly, the voice, I suggest, encourages us as viewers to question Ranjit’s identity as a revolutionary subject, something hinted at by the transitions between close-ups of Ranjit and images of collective protests.

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On one level, there is little to fault in Ranjit’s desire for a life of worldly comfort and security. But the voice reminds us that Ranjit owed the interview to a personal contact and not to his merit. Moreover, Ranjit was not averse to the idea of “extra” income through bribes and kickbacks. By the end of the last conversation, we are in little doubt that Ranjit has no lofty purpose in life, no calling, no goal to change society as long as his own needs are met. In short, he is an ordinary everyman. This knowledge of Ranjit makes the last five minutes of Interview far more ambiguous than was acknowledged by contemporary reactions to the film. The climactic sequences commence with a split frame. On one side there is Ranjit clad in his regular dhoti-kurta against a dark backdrop facing a fantasy figure on the other side. The latter is also Ranjit, but nattily dressed in a suit, striding confidently down a brightly illuminated corridor in a modern office. In a series of rapid cuts, the agitated dhoti-clad Ranjit continues the abovementioned conversation with the voice. His facial muscles tighten as he paces across the frame. Why, he asks, was his Bengali attire of a dhoti-kurta, denigrated as “clownish?” Why was he denied the job when he had “intelligence, talent, eligibility, everything they wanted, except the clothes?” “If I had two, three, four, suits; if I did not have to fear insects ruining my clothes, . . . if I had a bank balance . . . then I would have easily landed this job,” he shouts. Each statement is punctuated with an extended cut. After the last one, he suddenly gives a call to action against “injustice.” “We are forced to live in a dark society and we are forced to accept its rules. We should protest against them, shouldn’t we? We must raise our voice against them, shouldn’t we? We must show them that this is all a lie, an injustice, a scam?” These questions, addressed to the voice that was speaking to him a moment ago, go unanswered. Ranjit realizes that he is alone, as are we, the film’s audience. There is no one upon whom he can verbally vent his anger. The last scene cuts to a brightly lit shop window with a suit-clad mannequin as its main display item. Ranjit in his dhoti-kurta has the look of someone who has just woken up from a slumber. As a fast-paced score by Ananda Shankar, a fusion musician, plays in the background, there are rapidly alternating shots of Ranjit and the mannequin. A fast succession of shots follows: a freeze of Ranjit’s hand holding a stone that dissolves into the face of a young protestor shouting “Long live the revolution,” stills of Vietnamese peasants, African soldiers, Calcutta student protestors, a hammer and sickle, and women picketers on the streets. Ranjit throws the stone and shatters the shop window, rushes forward through the broken glass, and disrobes the mannequin. Yet nothing in this series of shots suggests an evolution of Ranjit as a revolutionary subject. Interview is not a bildungsroman of a revolutionary. My reason for recounting the key moments from Interview is to draw attention to its textual ambivalence through its overriding tone of satire and humor. Set in a Calcutta wracked by strikes (including one by the cine-workers union

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that is shown in the film), the scenes merge Ranjit’s anger into a larger landscape of political protests by students, workers, and peasants. But Sen is always clear to place Calcutta in a global setting. Hence framing shots of Calcutta protestors appear alongside stills and footage of Vietnamese peasants, Indian tribals, soldiers in Biafra, and so on. One way of reading this collocation of images would be to see Ranjit as the personification of the anger of the everyman in Calcutta. His anger is like a fusillade provoked by the experiences of the day, merging into revolutionary protests witnessed in the city and in other parts of the world during that time. At the same time, everything we have seen of Ranjit suggests that his rage is not fueled by any extraordinary sense of purpose. True, he is victim to a larger, systemic failure—crumbling infrastructure, petty corruption, an inept and callous bureaucracy on the one hand, and unemployment, penury, and want on the other. But as the voice reminded him, he, too, is not above desiring a larger income supplemented by bribes and kickbacks. It is almost as if Sen was inviting us to think of what would happen if Ranjit were successful in the interview. Would he not be another addition to a smug middle class cocooned in unreflective security? His solipsism is especially evident in the scenes of his mother and sister catering to his everyday needs; or when he fantasizes aloud with his well-to-do girlfriend about a well-appointed apartment filled with new objects. Sen uses gender to critique the angry young man, to underscore that this is no tale of rising consciousness. There is no indication throughout that he desires change in anything other than his own income. Hence his single-minded focus on a better job. At no point do we get any inkling of his political inclinations. He becomes a protestor against the injustice of forces outside his control due to his personal grievances and not out of ideological conviction. While Sen portrays these circumstances sympathetically, is that enough evidence to constitute Ranjit as a revolutionary figure? If not, then what meaning do we attribute to his decision to merge Ranjit’s anger, the anger of an ordinary man impelled by his unique circumstances with images of global revolutionary protests, a “world scale mobilization,” as Sen put it in an interview?14 Is it the case that all revolutionary anger arises out of self-interest? Or is ideology blind to the needs of the everyman? What, if any, is the relationship between ordinariness and revolution? Some of these issues return in Calcutta 71.

Calcutta 71: A Long History of Anger “Why 1971?” was a question raised by many critical discussants of Calcutta 71, the most widely debated film in Sen’s trilogy.15 We know from cultural and political accounts that the year 1971 was a culmination of sorts to the political instability that reigned throughout the 1960s in parts of India, Bengal

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5.1 An angry Ranjit stripping the mannequin, Interview.

preeminent among them.16 The Indian government’s role in the Bangladesh war of 1971, and the slogan of “garibi hatao” (remove poverty) swept the Congress party back to power, with Indira Gandhi as national leader, in the general elections that year. Congress ascendancy was accompanied by the brutal suppression of insurgent movements by the peasantry and urban youth that had started around 1967–68 in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, and on a smaller scale in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, and Delhi. The quelling of these insurgencies unleashed the state’s violence upon its own citizens on a scale unparalleled since India became independent of British rule. With the massive influx of refugees from Bangladesh, shortages in power and food, the rise of Maoism, burning and destruction of school and college buildings by Naxal activists inspired by the Maoist ideology, widespread strikes, lockouts, and black marketeering, 1971 signaled a historical moment whose impact was long-term but whose implications still remain understudied in Indian history. Calcutta 71, claimed Sen, was his way of historicizing the conflicting passions that culminated in this critical year in the postcolony. In West Bengal and its capital, Calcutta, the power of a leftist coalition of political parties continued to grow from the late 1960s despite the setback of the 1971 elections. Internal factionalism within that coalition was rife, as was a tripartite struggle between the different political formations: the Congress, the

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Left front, and the ultraradical Maoists. They produced an atmosphere of fear and suspicion to which extrajudicial killings by the police, murders, and bombings added an element of terror. Insurgent violence was matched measure for measure by government repression. Intellectual responses to Maoism in India were varied. Many regarded Maoist student and peasant rebels as “terrorists” and “guerrilla” fighters.17 Inder Malhotra writes contemptuously about “mindless Naxalite violence,” noting that the “wide world was abuzz with lurid reports . . . what with college boys and lumpen goons killing individual policemen and Radio Peking . . . screaming that this was the ‘spark that would start the prairie fire.’ ”18 Those sympathetic to them saw Naxalites as revolutionary heroes. For example, one account described them as ethical “accusers” who were tortured by the state. “The youthful fingers that play deftly with grenades are also those that pick out liberals and identify them as active agents of a rotten culture,” wrote Ranajit Guha, highlighting a strand of thinking that was deeply disillusioned with democratic politics in India. Echoing this sense of betrayal, insurgent violence was predicated on seeing Indian democracy as dysfunctional, the electoral system as compromised and imposed upon the “people” by the “ruling classes who themselves framed the constitution.” Anything short of armed violence was bound to fail in the face of this oppressive order, for “an appeal to the torturer’s conscience is to ask the cheetah, in the classic Gandhian manner, to change its spots.”19 In light of intellectual responses such as this, it is not difficult to understand why West Bengal was often regarded as India’s Vietnam and the struggles by peasants in the Bengal countryside under a radical Maoist leadership likened to those of their Chinese counterparts.20 It is unlikely that Calcutta 71 would have caused even half the stir it did had it been a straightforward reflection of the aforementioned political position. Or if it depicted its opposite: a peaceful liberal stance. Indeed many critical viewers misrecognized it for one or the other. But while it drew upon many of the events mentioned above, both local and national, the political worldview articulated in the film, like that of its predecessor, was ambiguous—even more so. Sen expressed this ambivalence when he said of 1971 in an echo of A Tale of Two Cities, “Those were the best of days, those were the worst of days.”21 The film, contrary to the polarized opinions that followed its release, rejects being “partisan” to any political party or line.22 It engaged the contemporary condition in a historical vein. Like Interview, what we witness here in a more elaborated form is an attempt to understand anger, the preeminent public emotion irrespective of which side of the political spectrum one belonged to. Anger, argued Sen, was not the monopoly of only those who wished to shake up the status quo. Those who were invested in maintaining the established order of things experienced anger in equal measure. His portrayal of the so-called establishment is more comprehensive here than in Interview. It encompasses the family, civil society, and the state—all variously broken. Anger is a

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5.2 Cover of a special issue on Calcutta 71, Chitrabhaash.

pervasive response of all those who felt helpless in the vice grip of each of these institutions. Some details about the film will clarify this. Calcutta 71 opens with a voiceover and intertitle that recurs at the end of each of the five episodes that make up the film. A disembodied male voice announces, “My age is twenty. During this time, I have been trudging for a

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thousand years, making my way through poverty, blight, and death. I have been witnessing history for a thousand years. A history of need, deprivation, oppression.”23 While the sojourner remains invisible until the last sequences of the film, the revelation of his age establishes the importance of a young male functioning as a witness to a seemingly interminable historical condition that was at once ancient and modern. Unlike in Interview or Padatik, this young man has no known antecedents. Despite the fact that many reviews claimed, perhaps with some justification, that the man was a Maoist student activist, nothing in the film’s diegesis actually states this. We know nothing of his family, his education, or his political affiliations. In tune with the rest of the trilogy, here, too, the viewer is constantly reminded through a montage of shots, stills, documentary, and found footage that the city is the epicenter of action. While one out of the five episodes takes place on a train that ran between the villages and Calcutta, recurring images of hungry refugees on the city’s pavements, newspaper headlines, police firings on urban protestors, deserted movie theaters, vandalized college laboratories, nightclubs, processions, and rallies leave little doubt that the film’s site for historical exploration is the city. As mentioned above, Calcutta 71 began where Interview left off. The first episode of the film is a courtroom sequence that combines fantasy and burlesque.24 Ranjit is on the stand charged with the crime of disrobing the mannequin. The prosecution’s argument that he should have attacked the striking

5.3 Street protests in Calcutta 71. Sen used similar footage in Bhuvan Shome. See

figures 2.3 and 2.4.

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laundry workers produces a flight of fancy in Ranjit as he imagines a ragtag band of agitated capitalists, all laundry owners, firing fake bullets on their opponents. Collapsing into a bout of hysterical laughter at this notion, he reminds everyone that the capitalists’ jamboree is make-believe, and in fact we are in the midst of dire times in Calcutta in the year 1971. Framing the film with this theater of the absurd was, I suggest, Sen’s commentary on the state of uneven development in the country. India’s story was neither that of booming capitalism nor a functioning socialist system. Want and scarcity were endemic features of everyday life, leading to eruptions of violence among people, and between the state and people, a caricatured version of which we see in the battle between laundry owners and workers. But the city was not always this chaotic. Nor did it always strike terror in the hearts of its denizens. As if to communicate to viewers the sense of a lost world of peace, the courtroom scene cuts to a shot of Suhasini Mulay, who debuted in Bhuvan Shome as discussed in chapter 2, strolling on the deserted grounds of the Victoria Memorial, an important Calcutta tourist landmark. Her stroll is suddenly interrupted by the sound of gunfire. Startled, she cowers against the Doric pillars as a radio announcement about the bullet-ridden body of an unknown youth that was found on the north-west corners of the Calcutta maidan fills the soundtrack. The four episodes that followed this strange opening scene are an effort to make sense of a present filled with wanton violence that jarred everyday life in the city. In many interviews, Sen emphasized that it was important for him to establish that “our history”—that is the history of Calcutta and India—was one of “exploitation,” “deprivation,” and “poverty.” Communicating to viewers this sense of history was the “lead motive” of the film.25 This statement helps us unpack the structure of Calcutta 71 that begins in the present, and loops back to the past to track history over three decades, before returning once more to the present. For the three decades—the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—Sen adapted three short stories by well-known Bengali writers Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–1956), Prabodh Sanyal (1905–1983), and Samaresh Basu (1924–1988), respectively.26 The fourth and last episode was based on a loose script written by Sen and Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay, a well-known thespian. Each episode was linked to the next through a rolling intertitle and the voiceover of the twentyyear-old witness of history. The first episode after the courtroom scene takes us back to 1933. On a night of torrential rain and thunder, an impoverished family of five is forced to leave their hovel to seek shelter in the concrete dwelling of a well-to-do neighbor. Based on the short story, “Atmahatyar Adhikar” (The right to suicide), the episode highlights the brutalization of human beings from deprivation and poverty, and speaks directly to Sen’s project of restoring the “abandoned, unprotected, shelterless” into the history of human lives.27 The father in the

5.4 Above, Ranjit on trial for his crime of undressing the mannequin, Calcutta 71; below, Ranjit’s satirical reverie about the march of the ruling classes.

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family is shown as a callous and ill-tempered man. His softer instincts dulled by ceaseless want, he calmly tells his wife not to worry about their infant daughter catching pneumonia for “it will not kill her.” As with Interview, gender serves as the standpoint of Sen’s critique. A father irritated by the sight of his child sleeping peacefully calls attention to the callousness of his sex. His anger, we realize, stems from a deep frustration at being painted into a corner by a life from which there is no way out. The episode’s most evocative moments occur when he sensually rubs his skin in the dirty rainwater that leaks through their roof. “Even this may not be available tomorrow,” he tells his bewildered wife. Another moment of note is when nature’s fury forces together man and animal as both try to escape the heavy downpour. A stray dog we had seen the father violently beat up poignantly makes its way to the shelter before the family, evoking images of the Bengal famine of 1943 whose brutality is memorialized in the art of Sunil Janah, Zainul Abedin, and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya.28 Sen’s metacomment in this and other episodes is established here: civility is a human artifice that has little meaning in a world ravaged by poverty and inequity. He charged his filmic and literary predecessors with sentimentalizing poverty and rendering it respectable.29 Even though he never names it, the depiction of poverty in Pather Panchali immediately comes to mind. Eschewing nostalgia that rendered poverty meaningful or noble, Sen’s goal in Calcutta 71 is to highlight it as “grinding,  ruthless, unrelenting.”30 Its only outlet was in mindless anger. On the one hand, such a treatment of poverty is reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of “bare life” as a “zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast.”31 On the other hand, and notwithstanding his critique of humanist sensibilities in earlier literary and filmic traditions, Sen’s own depictions of poverty are sometimes shot through with these sentiments. Witness for example the scene of the family, as a single-file caravan of bare feet, making their way through grimy rainwater. The unfolding of a history of anger continued into the second episode. This time, the anger emanates from a group of women, particularly the older daughter, a role essayed by actress Madhabi Mukherjee. This episode, based on a short story called “Angar” (Embers), is more relentless than the previous in its depiction of the hollowness of values of bourgeois respectability. They collapse, Sen demonstrates, unless basic human needs are met. Set in 1943, this episode explores the dynamics of a family, particularly its three women, a mother and her two daughters living in a workingmen’s “mess” in Calcutta. 1943 was the year of one of the worst man-made famines in colonial India.32 The episode has realist invocations of the famine: stills of rickety children, groups of hungry boys running to households that gave “phyan” (rice-water) to famine refugees, and references to the family’s flight from the village due to poverty and unemployment. Famine for Sen was a human condition that was more than the sum of these parts. It was a tragedy that stripped human beings of dignity. Just as the

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partition of Bengal in 1947 into East Pakistan and West Bengal remained a lifelong preoccupation for Ghatak, so did the famine for Sen. Understanding its implications was a vital component in his project of redefining history. He wanted to depict “the most vital aspect of our history” which was “the physical look of hunger.” The latter, he argued, remains the same over time. What changed were people’s “perception[s]” about poverty and their responses to it. He called this “the dialectics of hunger, the dialectics of poverty.”33 To drive home his point about the preeminence of hunger and famine in the history of modern India, Sen commenced this episode with a shot of Gyanesh Mukherjee. The informed viewer would recognize this as a citation from Sen’s first film on the 1943 famine, Baishey Shravana (The Wedding Day, 1960). This, and the fact that Madhabi Mukherjee, the lead actress in the earlier film, is cast as the angry elder daughter, Shobhona, is Sen’s signposting of the centrality of famine to his cinematic enterprise. Malati in Baishey Shravana did not die from starvation but in grief at her husband’s selfishness over food. Shobhona in the 1943 episode of Calcutta 71 has no trace of sentimentality. She lashes out at her mother and other neighbors for their hypocrisy in denying the fact that both she and her younger sister Minu were prostituting themselves to meet the family’s basic needs of food and shelter. This change in women’s response to hunger reflected a shift in social attitudes “from resignation and . . . callousness . . . to cynicism . . . defeat and . . . finally to anger and violence which can be very creative in the process.”34 Creativity in expressing anger at systemic injustices is the theme of the episode set in 1953. Here we see young boys who eked out a living as rice smugglers. Based on Samaresh Basu’s short story Esmuggler, the Bengali mispronunciation of the English word deliberately highlighting the boys’ lack of middle-class education, this is the story of Gourango. He is the leader of a group of early teenage boys who transport contraband rice as stowaways on trains that connected Calcutta to the villages. Once again, an exploration of famine as a general condition is meant to remind viewers of the food shortage that was a continuous feature of life from the time of the economic depression, the years of the Second World War, the 1943 famine, the partition of 1947, and into the 1960s. The acute shortage in food grains compelled the state to start a rationing system that was mired in corruption, eventually causing food riots in Calcutta and other parts of Bengal around 1964–66. Hunger gave birth to new political actors among preteens and teenage boys who displayed agency in the manner of Gourango in the film.35 These young boys, Sen argued in conversations, were identified as the “head of the family” in government-issued ration cards. In the film we find them treated with disdain by middle-class passengers who jeer at them as “lumpen” for their lack of refinement and crude speech. Gourango’s childish revenge on the middle-class copassenger when he trips him is Sen’s dramatization that boys like him “fear nothing.” Hounded by the police, they “hate to be arrested . . . they hate to go to jail . . . because they

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fear nothing but starvation,” which would befall their families should they be imprisoned.36 Undocumented and unsung by society, they signal the birth  of a new precarious culture of survival that threatens middle-class respectability. Despite the episodic structure, the use of the three aforementioned short stories give the history of anger and poverty in Calcutta 71 a coherent, linear, and forward-marching structure. The intertitle and voiceover by the young man link each decade to the previous one. They also help viewers not to lose sight of Sen’s argument about hunger and poverty being constant features of Indian life despite the country’s transition from the colonial to a postcolonial state. Subtle changes in the intertitle, such as lines about the “betrayal of ancestors” or interrogation marks on a blank screen, add an element of dynamism to the project of historicization he is undertaking. The phrase about the betrayal of ancestors, for example, that appeared in the postindependence episode is Sen’s invitation to viewers to consider the meaning of national sovereignty when people remained poverty-stricken, unemployed, and generally insecure in the new republic of India. Haven’t our ancestors betrayed us, he asks, when the new political dispensation still requires children to martyr themselves to combat hunger? Rage, blind and without a fixed target, seemed to be the only response available to people caught in a blocked dialectic of poverty. This linear narrative of rage, however, unravels with the arrival of the episode set in 1971. Narrative certainty—and teleology—vanishes. The viewer is jolted back and forth between scenes of a party at a posh hotel and stills of hungry street children. Snatches of conversation—crude and brash—and Ananda Shankar’s music played by the rock band led by Cyrus Tata covey images of immoral and irresponsible wealth. A disingenuous politician who was once a black marketeer makes grand claims about the sorry plight of workers but thinks nothing of trampling over the rights of trade unionists. A vapid socialite announces she needs ice cream to cope with the summer heat as she volunteers her services for the rehabilitation of political prisoners from the Maoist-leaning Naxalite movement. Such myriad chatter in the party is interlaced with stills and found footage of refugees, posters of the upcoming elections, emaciated children, and student rallies. Sen’s “taste for pamphleteering, to blend the fictional with . . . actualities, to draw conclusions on a propagandist note” are on display here.37 Missing the narrative causality of the first three episodes, Sen’s cinema becomes deliberately open-ended with its arrival in 1971. His goal, he argued, was to create the effect of “political pamphleteering.” The chaotic nature of the episode suggests that cinema’s only task when faced with such a crisis in political conviction, as I will argue in my analysis in the next chapter with Ray’s city trilogy, is that of witnessing. The historicism at work for the previous decades loses certainty, as it were, in 1971. There was a development from “cold

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cynicism . . . [with a] ferment of rage within” in 1933 to “anger and vengeance” in 1943 to rage turning itself into “creative” subversion in 1953.38 With the arrival into 1971, all that Sen can offer is to unveil the faces of “merchants of oppression.” Just as we witness multiple oppressors—politicians, socialites, police, political parties—the screen goes dark, putting a brake on our impulse to hastily label a single entity or group as the oppressor. Instead, the plangent voice of the twenty-year-old slowly becomes embodied as a shaft of light illuminates his bleeding face. He implores with the viewers to not be frightened by him. “I am not carrying a gun or revolver, or bomb, or pipe gun,” he says “because I am dead.” He reminds us that he was killed at a particular spot on the maidan that morning. As the image fades in and out, Sen has the anonymous young man break the fourth wall, a trope he used extensively in Interview, and address the audience. I know who murdered me today. But I will not reveal their names as I want you to look for my killers. Don’t sit placidly . . . until you have found them. I want you to suffer. . . . Those who murdered me today, hunted me down through the entire country, have once again returned, they are now standing behind me to kill me again. My crime is that I reacted; for a thousand years I remained an eternal twenty-year-old and I reacted. . . . Why don’t you react? How can you not suffer, rage, and recoil at my horrific death?

The last six minutes are probably the most programmatic portion in the film. The dead youth’s exhortation functions like a chorus linking up the decades from 1930 to 1970.39 They provide the bridge that connects a painting depicting hungry faces by the contemporary artist Subhaprasanna to the families we witnessed in 1930–40 and the smuggler boys in the 1950s.40 A penultimate montage of strikes and police firings in Calcutta, massacres in the Biafran war of 1967, and Mai Lai in 1968 follow the dead man’s appeal to the audience to “react.” The final moments of the film show the young narrator running through forests and mountains ending up in the lanes of Calcutta until unknown assailants shoot him down again at the maidan. As his dead body lies on the grass face down, the early morning opening music of All-India radio plays in the background.

A Political Cinema?: Contemporary Misrecognitions Most reviews, commentaries, and analyses on Calcutta 71 agreed that it established Sen as a “political” filmmaker and distinguished him from Ray, who was also engaged in his own Calcutta films during these years. There were, however, serious disagreements about what constituted the substance of Sen’s

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5.5 The twenty-year-old revolutionary narrator, Calcutta 71.

politics. Some decried it as the director’s “jihad” against contemporary society. Others described it as a “documentary mode” of retelling the “tired” theme of poverty—a filmic rendering of Indira Gandhi’s election slogan “garibi hatao.”41 Still others described it as a piece of motion picture propaganda belonging to “an active, extremist political party,” a veiled reference to the Maoist faction of the Communist Party of India (CPI [ML]). Other reports, while granting that this was a “striking film essay,” singled out the epilogue arguing that “Sen hammers the point” about poverty “through the agency of his young and timeless Chorus” with such force as if “he didn’t trust his audience’s acquaintance with the familiar medium of cinema.”42 Despite these shortcomings, several of the same critics credited Sen with possessing a sense of a “clear historical dialectic.”43 He was not a “bourgeois” filmmaker like Satyajit Ray, nor a “ivory tower aesthete” like Mani Kaul, and his craftsmanship was “far too superior” to remind “us of Satyadev Dubey.”44 Others were less generous. Nirmal Kumar Ghosh writing for the daily newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika insinuated that Sen’s filmmaking was pretentious: Like Godard Sen might feel like saying this about this film “Monsieur, we are going to be simple.” That way, he may also have the smug satisfaction that he

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may have also been understood, for that alone is his prime passion. But believe me, Mr. Sen, Godard with all his virtuous wish for simplicity is neither simple nor understood, whereas you perfectly are: far too well understood and simple, perhaps oversimple at times. That is the great divide between you and Godard.45

Sen failed his task as a historian, argued Mrigankasekhar Roy, by excluding the 1960s from his chronicle of the past. The wars against China and Pakistan in 1962 and 1965, as well as numerous insurgencies, gave the 1960s a unique character in Indian history. The historical crisis of 1971 could not be understood without engaging that history.46 His historical account, argued Ashok Rudra, was a “falsification” of 1971. Taking issue with Sen’s depiction of 1971 through the party scene he noted that “historically, 1971 was a year of terror. The rich were terrorized; so terrorized that their boring, banal society activities reached an extremely low ebb. Better off people were too afraid to go out in the evenings.”47 Here is how Rudra elaborated on the “battlefield” that was Calcutta in 1971: It was a battlefield where on the one side was ranged the entire police and military might of the state, on the other youths who had left home and hearth, given up education and career, and had taken up arms in revolt against oppression . . . armed policemen were killed in broad daylight, in the sight of thousands of spectators. . . . More tragically, it was a battlefield where youth killed youth . . . because of the blind and suicidal fratricidal fight between youth groups and because of the criminal . . . elements who in large numbers penetrated the ranks of revolutionaries. . . . 1971 was a year when left parliamentarism was totally paralyzed in West Bengal—it reached its nadir of bankruptcy.48

Protesting against poverty, Rudra argued, did not get anyone in India killed. So the death of the young boy “who walked through a thousand years of injustice” was not because he had protested. “Boys got killed in 1971” because “they had come to the . . . realization that mere protests would not do anymore.”49 Alleging that the youth’s death was staged in a manner that made the audience think that the police killed him, Rudra reiterated that the historical complexity of 1971 was that the “first shots were fired not by the police” but by the young revolutionaries in an assault against the state and youth groups belonging to other political factions.50 Some critics questioned Sen’s leftist intellectual position and disparaged the film for denying altogether the “aspect” of “class struggle” and propagating instead the line of “non-Marxian social scientists such as Gunnar Myrdal, Galbraith, and such active exponents as McNamara.”51 By now, readers should not be surprised by such accounts of impassioned debates about cinema in Bengal, thanks to the growing film society movement.

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Debates around cinema had by the 1960s found a place alongside similar debates around theater, literature, and music that had longer pasts.52 What made the reception of Calcutta 71, and following it Padatik, especially striking were the ways in which understandings of the cinema were refracted through the lens of global, revolutionary ideologies. Nowhere was this clearer than in an intense exchange in Movie Montage, the journal published by the film society Cine Central in Calcutta.53 Dipendu Chakrabarty, a professor of English and older brother of the (then) young radical director, Utpalendu Chakrabarty, read the film as a statement of Sen’s disillusionment with parliamentary democracy. The death of the young man, the montage of posters of different political parties, interrogation marks on a blank screen, intertitles that spoke of poverty and betrayal by ancestors were signs of that disillusionment. He added that when the dead youth appealed for a “reaction,” his call was to middle-class audiences and not to the peasants and laborers who were unlikely to watch a film like this. He reminded Sen’s critics that Calcutta in 1971–72 was a different political landscape than Cuba, north Vietnam, or the territories occupied by the Vietcong. Sen made a film that reflected his own context rather than one addressed by Jean-Luc Godard or Santiago Alvarez. Unlike Ray, who recoiled from showing the plight of the poor in Seemabaddha (Company Limited), Sen, in his opinion, had gone deep into their lives. This made his work a signature of protest. His agitprop style remained true to the basic premise of Marxist and Maoist ideology—that of class struggle. Chakrabarty also saw in the figure of the dead youth the repudiation of a literary tradition in Bengali romanticism. The eternal twenty-year-old was reminiscent of the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das’s (1899–1954) renowned poem “Banalata Sen” that chronicled the thousand-year-old journey of a lone romantic male. And yet, Sen’s dead youth epitomized an excoriating riposte to such solitary romanticism by indexing the collectivist youthful angst immortalized in such images as haather aranya (the forest of hands) in the poem “Micchiler Mukh” (The face in the procession) by the Bengali communist poet Subhas Mukhopadhyay (1919–2003).54 Sen’s film testified that he reacted politically “towards our history, to our past, and to the contemporary period.”55 Chakrabarty’s articles elicited strong rejoinders. Reading them today leaves little doubt that contemporary viewers of Calcutta 71 were at a loss for a nonteleological, critical vocabulary to analyze art cinema. Debates about revolutionary consciousness and ideology that saturated the contemporary public sphere prevented any recognition that the film intended to register its confusion about the contemporary. Even as Sen eschewed the progressive teleology of Marxist revolution, criticism of his film returned to that theme with indefatigable energy. Calcutta 71 (and many other films discussed in this book) had become the site on which a debate about Maoist ideology and the arts was

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being staged. Briefly put, wherever Chakrabarty credited Calcutta 71 (and Interview) with historical dynamism, his detractors read stasis. For them the yardsticks of a political cinema, or of the arts more generally, were those outlined in Mao Zedong’s 1942 address on art and literature in Yan’an. That the film was a sovereign mode of intellection about the present, attentive to but not freighted by the baggage of ideology, did not seem like a possibility. It is worth singling out some of their observations to give readers a sense of the extent to which ideological preferences influenced the reception of Sen’s (and indeed Ray’s and Ghatak’s) unorthodox political aesthetic. The 1930s, argued critics such as Nityapriya Ghosh, Shuvendu Dasgupta, and Shaktiprosad Sengupta, were depicted by Sen as a decade of quiet suffering where the only visible sign of protest was kicking a dog. In the 1940s, women of a middle-class family whose fortunes were sliding took to sex work under a thicket of lies and deception so as not to disturb the veneer of respectability. Protest here implied family squabbles. If Sen saw the 1950s as a decade where rage took on a creative edge in the person of the adolescent rice smuggler Gourango, these critics argued that it was a distorted portrayal of class consciousness. Having skipped the 1960s, the film suddenly arrived into the theme of protest in 1971. By failing to provide any diegetic antecedents to the dead youth, Sen had falsified history, or at best provided a narrative that fell short of explaining conditions of revolutionary violence. In other words, he had neglected the “dialectical” nature of history, presenting it only in terms of lack; hence its accent on “poverty, deprivation, oppression.” Historical dynamism was the result of class struggle, a theme absent in the film. Invoking Mao, they averred that “Writers and artists should study society, . . . the various classes in society, their mutual relations and respective conditions, their physiognomy and their psychology. Only when we grasp all this clearly can we have a literature and art that is rich in content and correct in orientation.” No member of the audience could ever be shaken out of their inertia by watching a film that showed nothing of the actual dynamics of class struggle. Sen, and those who praised Calcutta 71, were in fact closer to Mao’s description of counterrevolutionary writers and artists, and a “comprador elite” who looked down upon the masses as “born fools” or as “tyrannical mobs.” It is clear that the earnestness of their embrace of Maoist ideology made it difficult for these critics to appreciate the “flippancy” and “quixotic elements” that Sen regarded as hallmarks of his style. Style, however, was mobilized to offer a different understanding of the past and present. The reception of Calcutta 71 was filtered through a strong current of contemporary radical politics in Bengal whose literal embrace of Maoist doctrine dictated its opposition to “both the tendency to produce works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the ‘poster and slogan style’ which is correct in

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political viewpoint but lacks artistic power.”56 Distinguishing a cinema of protest from Sen’s “reformist” cinema, these authors invoked third cinema films by Getino and Solanas, Sanjinés, Gleyzer, Solas, and the earlier works of Joris Ivens. Critical viewers projected onto Calcutta 71 their own anxieties and expectations about what the right kind of political film ought to be. The gap between the views expressed by the critics and the situation that Sen sought to address in the trilogy are perhaps best captured in some reminiscences by the director. Though the official shooting for Calcutta 71 began in 1970, Sen had for over a year been filming footage of rallies and processions. These sequences eventually made their way into the film, and became “unexpected evidence” of people who had later disappeared, or were suspected to have been killed by the police. “Young boys . . . would keep coming back” to see the film again, “perhaps with their family and their friends. They would watch [the film] over and over again, just for another glimpse of their friend.”57 Another time a young woman fainted upon catching a glimpse of her son on screen. He had “later been shot by the police,” recalled Sen. Many people who were “wanted” by the police were arrested from the “serpentine queues” outside Metro cinema where the film was exhibited. As he put it in an interview conducted in 2001, “the times mattered a lot.”58 While the quality of the film “is an important factor . . . equally important is the timing of the whole thing.”59 In short, an analysis of Calcutta 71 is unthinkable without its relationship with contemporary history. Moreover, the film articulated Sen’s particular theory of history, one that was marked by the context in which the project was undertaken but also sought to understand that time historically. No one who lived through 1971, Sen argued in an interview published in Chitrabikshan, would be a stranger to scenes of young men chased and hunted down by a battery of armed policemen. But he urged readers also to visualize a situation where an angry young man murdered a traffic constable. As the dead man lay in a pool of his own blood, a few vegetables . . . rolled out of his pocket. Perhaps he was supposed to return home from his duties and cook himself a meager meal. Perhaps in that moment when he lay dead, his wife in some remote village was trying to scrape together her scarce resources to repay the local moneylender. . . . Perhaps the money mailed by her now dead husband had not yet arrived forcing her to pawn the last metal plate in the house.60

The humanism implicit in this imaginary tale shaped the filmic depiction of 1971. It also illustrated Sen’s predicament, one he tried to narrativize through the history of anger in the film. For him, both the constable and the young man who killed him were victims of deprivation and poverty. But the system of which

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they were both parts pitted them against one another in a battle of mutual annihilation. Calcutta 71 was his attempt, however uneven its formal execution, to portray the “injustice” that saturated the giant, faceless, sclerotic system. There was no friend or enemy in Calcutta 71, but multiple pathways to anger.

Padatik: Politics as Sober Reappraisal How best could anger be channeled into a politics capable of producing meaningful social change? Padatik, the last film in the trilogy, gestures toward an answer by clearing a space from which to undertake a sober reappraisal of anger and its aftermath. An opening voiceover registers the passing of time as the narrator speaks of his “return” to Calcutta. Every time he comes back, the city seems more “infernal” and “unbearable.” Its relentless poverty is “more militant” and the despair enveloping it “more desperate.” Each time he expects to see Calcutta grind to a halt, but the city refuses to die despite its stygian conditions. The film explored, without prescriptive certainty, ways of converting the endemic defiance of the city into a fecund source of living. While the opening voiceover establishes Calcutta as the film’s center, the montage of stills and documentary footage seen in the earlier films—but supplemented here with additional images of newspaper headlines about strikes, lockouts, industrial disputes, disruption of college and university examinations, bloody feuds between competing political factions, and economic stagnation in different parts of India (Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and the Punjab)—situates Padatik in a nationwide milieu. India in turn is placed on a global canvas with the shot of a globe on which a finger traces a line connecting sites of revolutionary protest movements in the postdecolonization era. These global struggles are inserted into the diegesis in a letter shared by the female lead, Shila Mitra, with Sumit, the principal male character. Written by her dead brother, the letter speaks of his desires to be a comrade to “all the freedom-loving people of the world.” “Do not worry about me,” he writes, for “I am not alone. There are thousands of people with me. Those who dream of building a better world . . . are fighting for it. . . . All of Asia is fighting, [and also] Latin America.” The Bengali meaning of the word padatik is foot soldier. Both that sense of the word as well as the English title of the film, The Guerrilla Fighter, applied to the ultraradical Maoist youth who resorted to unorganized but extreme violence from the late 1960s against the state and members of competing political groups, including other factions on the Left. Immediately after the opening voiceover and before the title credits, we see the young narrator from Calcutta 71 running through city lanes until unseen assailants gun him down. Whereas we knew nothing about him in the previous film, Padatik reveals that he was

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in fact a foot soldier of the Maoist faction of the Communist Party of India (CPI [ML]), better known as the Naxalites. The protagonist of the film, Sumit, is a Naxal fugitive. The diegesis revolves around his days in a hideout, a comfortable and posh apartment owned by a female advertising executive, during which he introspects about the meaning and future direction of communist revolutionary violence. His political life has thus far been a cycle of violence, arrest, escape, and more violence. Over the course of the film, he ponders whether or not there is a way out of that cycle. What are the responsibilities of the party leadership in organizing the band of foot soldiers like him who spend their time engaging in stray acts of terror and eluding the police? Introspection makes him increasingly critical of the leadership in the party and the latter’s sectional character. Padatik, thus, is about the need for a new political vanguard that will be capable of envisioning a fresh postcolonial compact. In an interview that appeared around the time of the film’s release, Sen clarified that “Padatik has something to do with the contemporary political scene.”61 Elaborating further, he added, “We had arrived at a point when the Left movement was lying low and the Leftist parties were in disarray, losing perspective and in isolation, at a time when there was a need for unceasing selfcriticism. That is why the protagonist in Padatik has unshaken faith in the party even though he has suffered reverses due to faulty direction. Yet he does question the leadership bitterly and uncompromisingly.”62 Sen’s critique of the Left movement, one he ventriloquized through Sumit, met with mixed responses, just like the previous two films had.63 Most critical comments focused on the incongruity of a Naxal youth accepting hospitality from a wealthy female advertising executive. They dismissed as romantic and sentimental the eventual union between the angry young Naxal and his father, an ex-nationalist worker. But Sen’s project, as I have been arguing, went beyond the narrow understandings of contemporary revolutionary Marxism or Maoism. In his understanding and portrayal of the long history of the twentieth century, particularly from the vantage of communist parties, the more the latter fought the “establishment” the more they adopted the ruling elites’ “mores and manners.” Party cadres often “go the established way in order to fight the establishment.” As a committed leftist he felt that it was “important to raise these issues.” Not to do so would be “suicidal, detrimental, ruinous.” However faulty his portrayal, it was far worse “not to discuss these issues at all when you know there is something wrong somewhere, maybe in the cadres, maybe in the leadership, maybe somewhere else.”64 As if responding to those who claimed that the film was an unfair indictment of Indian Maoism, he countered, “When making Padatik, I was always conscious that the line between self-criticism and slander is very thin . . . I had the greatest respect for those who played militant roles in the Naxalite movement; at the same time I was critical

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of them. It was the right time to be critical, for things were quiet at the time and the movement itself had somewhat disintegrated. That was the situation in which I chose to do a bit of soul searching.”65

The Future of the Foot Soldier To unravel the core of these statements and to understand the future that Sen imagined for the history of anger he was mapping in the trilogy, we need to analyze precisely those aspects of Padatik that contemporaries either ignored completely or found less than credible. In the interests of space, I dwell on three themes that emerge from an analysis of the film: leftist politics as a broad coalition, intergenerational bonds, and creaturely comforts. They constitute Sen’s answer, I suggest, to a problem that has dogged Maoist thought, one highlighted by Mao Zedong in 1926 in his “Analyses of the Classes in Chinese Society.” These issues are ventriloquized through Sumit when he is poring over Maoist literature in Shila Mitra’s apartment. “All our revolutions have come to naught because we have not been able to distinguish our friends from our foes— something we must have done right at the beginning.” These questions about who is a friend and who is an enemy recur through the film. Sen gestures toward possible answers through an analysis of the three themes outlines above.

Politics as Intersectional Coalition My starting point is a sequence that initially appears out of joint with the rest of the film.66 Here the advertising executive, Shila Mitra (played by Simi Garewal) interviews a number of women—ex-nationalist activists, academics, and a renowned singer—about their perceptions of the conditions of women in urban India. Nowhere in Sen’s cinema, either before or after Padatik, do we get such a direct engagement with issues that constitute the core of second-wave feminism, both in India and elsewhere, raising questions about why Sen chose to insert this sequence in the film. I argue that Sen was attempting to draw a comparison between the women’s movement and the one by leftist students and other radicals fighting in the name of working-class and peasant interests. Both movements, he seems to suggest, failed to produce deep and enduring social change due to their sectional character and their skewed notions about privilege. The latter became grounds for identifying allies and enemies of the movements, thereby rendering them narrow and unrepresentative of the people as a whole. Despite nuanced differences in the views articulated by the respondents, they converge on the important point that even after thirty-six years of independence, women in India were still battling unfreedom, both at home and in the

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workplace. All agreed on the point that in a society where wealth was a marker of status and respect, there remain deep cleavages between women of “privilege” and others. They agreed that women are more visible than before in public: in political rallies, movie theaters, sporting arenas, and on public transport. Public presence alone was not a guarantee of deep-rooted change in the status and position of women. An elderly respondent submits that in her experience as a nationalist activist she found that single women, whether spinsters or widows, enjoyed greater freedom of action than did those with families. The latter had to seek permission from their fathers, husbands, and sons for every decision they made. For another, the fact that her elderly mother-in-law could now travel alone on public transportation when twenty years ago women found it impossible to travel, even in groups, without a male escort, counted as a privilege. What is evident from the varied viewpoints is that the understanding of privilege depends on one’s social position. Thus an economically successful woman who earned more than her husband had to battle problems associated with his inferiority complex. When statements such as these are intercut with shots of a little girl carrying a heavy bucket of water collected from a shared hand-pumped tubewell in a slum, we realize that for many women and girls the right to “work” was hardly a privilege. Privilege itself is a relative concept in a society marked by deep cleavages in wealth. The women’s movement, like any other social movement, needed to strike a balance between academic considerations and the actuality of women’s lives. The “attitude survey” concluded that without greater equity in society, there could be no proper recognition of the rights of individuals. Without the latter there could be no equality in gender relations. What was needed, therefore, was change in the “social structure” as a whole. A sound bridge concluded the “attitude survey” and carried it into the next scene. The women’s voices merge with Sumit’s, who is shown concluding a long letter to a party elder, Nikhil-da. It is worth reprising these scenes, that included shots meant as visual counterparts to Sumit’s epistolary critique. “India requires a revolution in every strata of life,” writes Sumit, echoing the theme we heard a few minutes earlier in the survey. Only through a revolt against “darkness, superstition, poverty, . . . oppression, against all sorts of attacks” can a “new society” and a “new people” be born. The letter is written in the voice of a collective “we.” The latter is the party—the CPI (ML)—of which he is an active functionary. Written from the standpoint of a dedicated foot soldier, Sumit is not rejecting the party, but calling for (utopian) reform. He cautions that if “we” make any mistakes in this “ultimate war,” if blinded by “our anger” and “confusion” we “sink and stray,” then “history shall not forgive us.” Several images intercut these lines about anger and the wrath of history. That of a young rebel carrying a flaming torch into a college classroom follows a brief shot of a grainy image of Lenin. The dialogue about “confusion” in turn corresponds with two shots, one showing the statue of a nationalist leader with his face blackened,

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and another a bust of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee (1864–1924), a famous educator and the second vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, thrown face down on the ground. These scenes condensed the turbulent history of the late 1960s and early 1970s. We know from newspaper accounts that constitutive of the campus revolts of these years was the widespread practice of setting fire to classroom furniture, destruction of laboratories, and other university property. Even more controversial was rebel students’ practice of beheading or defacing of statues of nationalist icons and figures associated with the “Bengal Renaissance.”67 Many Naxal leaders defended these actions, seeing them as a reflection of Mao Zedong’s dicta about revolution as fanaticism, or that nothing could be built without something being broken first. Left-leaning groups that criticized such student action as misdirected were dismissed as “revisionists” and became targets of further violence, thereby creating a vicious cycle of infighting.68 When Sumit, an active revolutionary, calls attention to these acts as expressions of “confusion” and “anger,” he is challenging accepted ideas about revolution and attempting to introduce dissent into the party’s culture. Sumit’s letter connected with themes echoed in the survey. He begins the letter to the party leader, Nikhil-da, by raising questions about the extent to which the revolutionary struggle connects with the masses. Is the struggle truly for the “public” as claimed by the leadership? Did those who joined the movement do so of their own volition or from fear of retribution? The public, he argues, should be an expansive category that included all working peoples: farmers, laborers, and the middle classes. Even though the letter makes no mention of women, when juxtaposed with the “attitude survey,” the film converges on the need for what scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw call an “intersectional” politics.69 Taken together, these scenes also raise questions about whether or not it is fair for a peoples’ movement to mark those who did not share the same class position as the “other” or the “enemy.” Despite her well-to-do status, Shila has opened her doors to a Naxal fugitive. This act and the friendship that subsequently developed between her and Sumit aroused strong criticism both within the film (from Biman and Nikhilda), and from many viewers. The latter skewered Sen for choosing to house a Naxal fugitive in a shelter provided by a single, wealthy woman. As one letter to the journal Frontier put it, “Her lifestyle, . . . job, . . . marital status which puritanical as the young revolutionaries are” should have cast deep “doubts in the mind of the hero about the depth and authenticity of her sympathy.”70 By failing to show this or in choosing a refuge that is not the usual hideout such as “a lower middle class house inhabited . . . by a single old woman who does not understand or talk politics” or “peasant shelters,”71 Sen showed his complete lack of understanding of “youths’ eternal urge to revolt,”72 and proved himself to be “another might-have-been people’s artist.”73 In raising the issue of

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mistrust of “class enemies,” Sumit’s letter, I suggest, touched many a raw nerve both diegetically and among many of the film’s audiences. Shila, we learn, has deep affection for her brother, who left home to become a people’s warrior. A peon in her office regularly supplies her with radical, proscribed publications. Nikhil-da, the party elder, and Sumit’s young comrade Biman show no interest in or awareness of these aspects of Shila’s life and personality. Their attitude to her is aloof and instrumental. Her home provides a safe haven for the party, but she remains an outsider who could potentially corrupt members like Sumit with her upper-class lifestyle and feminine charms. But Shila’s privileged lifestyle, the film establishes, is not an obstacle to her strong political convictions about the left movement. Her experience as an abused wife recalls the survey’s conclusions about the idea of privilege itself being relative. Sumit’s (and Sen’s) call for the party to be more representative, I submit, was a tentative first step toward constituting a wider alliance between social groups, many of whom were hitherto overlooked and demonized by members of the radical left. The depth of these prejudices toward social others are amply illustrated by the critical comments elicited by the Sumit-Shila friendship in Padatik. When he first sets foot in her ninth-floor apartment, Sumit describes it as a “decorated prison” that stands far above the hubbub of the city. Even the indoor plants in the flat are not spared his sarcasm, when he insinuates that a money plant means easy wealth. Breaking this barrier of prejudices held by a Maoist foot soldier and having him befriend an upper-class, single woman is Sen’s symbolic gesture toward an urgent need for greater democracy in the Indian Left. The party, such as it was, needed to make room for those who inhabited different milieux. This accommodation also marks a shift in the history of anger. As the angry young man moved from Interview and Calcutta 71 into Padatik, his anger becomes less about “vehement passions.” He emerged more as a man of “sentiment” understood as “distributed feeling.” The dead angry youth had only witnessed history’s unfolding in Calcutta 71. As his successor, Sumit now wants the history of the future to be molded not by revulsion producing anger, but a sense of regard. He looks into the others’ eyes, Shila’s and his father’s, in order to forge politics through a “relay of regard.”74 The fate of women as communicated by the “attitude survey” has to be joined with that of the peasants, students, and other working people in a single coalition. Otherwise the marginalization of all hitherto disempowered social groups will continue.

Intergenerational Bonds While Shila represents someone who is alien to him by virtue of her class and gender, the political differences between Sumit and his father depict a generational rift. The father, played by the eminent theater personality Bijon

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Bhattacharya, is a trade unionist, a lower-middle-class man who was once an active participant in the armed struggle for national independence. The early exchange between father and son, one that Sumit recalls in a flashback, shows the father’s frustration at his son’s disaffection and his failure to shoulder household responsibilities and earn a living. He fails to understand the meaning of “revolution” that Sumit’s generation speaks of, or their devotion to leaders who were “opium addicts,” a reference to Mao Zedong. He reminds Sumit that the older generation, too, read Lenin; they were no less concerned about the plight of the country as evidenced by their struggles during the nationalist movement. Sumit has little patience for his father’s constant regurgitation of history. His conversations with Biman reveal how little they thought of the achievements of the nationalist generation, recalling Calcutta 71’s reference to the “betrayal by ancestors.” During his time as a fugitive, memories of differences with his father disturb Sumit’s imagination. At the end of the film, when Sumit goes home to visit his dying mother, knowing well that a trap has been laid to use her as bait to arrest him, there is a brief rapprochement between father and son. Faced with a present in which the ends of history are indeterminate, or underdetermined, Sen finds a sentimental, familial solution to an intergenerational impasse between the old and new left in Bengal. His father informs Sumit that he had refused to sign a bond that required striking workers in his factory to give an undertaking to the management that the trade union can no longer carry out strikes. This, we know, may cost him his job. It is a gesture that acknowledges the importance of protest against the status quo, a value he now shares with Sumit. He also informs Sumit that he has kept the dying mother in the dark about Sumit’s activities to give her some peace of mind. As the sound of approaching sirens make Sumit’s arrest imminent, the father encourages him to “be brave” and to keep fighting. Many critics regarded these moments of mutual recognition of one another’s beliefs and vulnerabilities as unfounded sentimentality and “bourgeois diffusionism.”75 But in the exchange of words and glances between father and son we witness Sumit’s dreams for a future postcolonial formation in potentia that brings generations together. Susobhan Sarkar, an eminent Bengali Marxist historian, after watching Padatik, had apparently remarked to Sen that he should have skipped the reconciliation between father and son for it would have been “historically correct” to have had Sumit shot by the police when he went home to see his dying mother. Sen’s response to this criticism is worth reprising as it sheds light on the importance of sentimentality, the Left, and the history of anger. It also brings to light the dialogic milieu inhabited by the three filmmakers under consideration in this book. “I never made this film for anyone or any Party,” said Sen. “I merely wanted to arrive at a certain conclusion, if I may call it that. An understanding between

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5.6 Rapprochement between father and son, Padatik.

the father and the son. That was my priority.”76 At the back of his mind, he revealed in an interview with Samik Bandyopadhyay, was a comparison with the famous sequence in Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara. There, upon hearing her brother talk about the birth of her baby nephew and the family’s joy at this new addition to the household, the consumptive heroine Nita screams, “I want to live.” Ghatak should have had the brother lie, argued Sen. Those descriptions of the family were too heartrending for a dying woman to hear, for they filled her with unbearable longing. No human being, with the “slightest bit of sympathy,” could be so cruel. Eschewing the argument that “in every epic, there comes a situation where it progresses beyond logic,”77 in the closing scene of Padatik Sen chose to spare the dying mother the “agony” of learning the truth about her son’s fatal future.

Creature Comforts Before closing, I want to comment on the world of objects we encounter in Padatik. Compared to the bare and impoverished homes in Interview and

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Calcutta 71, Shila Mitra’s apartment is full of objects. Sumit’s first response to the tasteful furniture in her flat and the array of cosmetics in her bedroom is biting sarcasm. But his encounter with the object world deepens over the next few days. For example, there is a long scene of Sumit taking a shower, luxuriating in the abundant water supply so much so that it spills out of the bathtub and floods the bathroom floor. The practice of pulling a shower curtain to prevent water from spilling out is alien to him, as most people in Calcutta would not have had showers in their bathrooms. It also recalls the scene from the 1933 episode in Calcutta 71 when the father feigned pleasure as he rubbed the dirty rainwater all over himself. Also important are the scenes of Sumit and Biman being flummoxed when Shila asks them how much sugar they had in their tea. While Sumit promptly answers “one and half spoons,” Biman tells her to pour as much as she liked. Essential household commodities such as sugar, milk, water, and tea were scarce commodities in postcolonial India. The trilogy as a whole maps this history of scarcity. In the context of that history, drinking tea with milk and sugar in fine china was a luxury that people like Sumit and Biman could ill afford. Readers will remember the fuss made by Ranjit’s mother in Interview when giving him a cup of morning tea with milk and sugar. Likewise, when Biman visits Nikhil-da, all that he is offered at the end of a long day is puffed rice. When Shila creates an advertisement for milk powder for babies that only the well-to-do can afford, its main selling point is that it is pure and unadulterated. The lack of contamination of food items had to be signaled to the postcolonial wealthy. Though several accounts took Sen to task for wasting “hundreds of meters of film over . . . quite pointless scenes . . . of cutlery, crockery . . . tea, coffee, shower, bath,” moments such as the above highlight the poignancy of the bind in which the angry young man finds himself. He does not crave the whisky consumed by Shila’s colleagues. But running water, a clean bathroom, sugar, tea, and milk, are things that his body gets used to quite easily. Is it fair to designate these as luxury items, or describe a society that denied its members access to such items as civilized? Only in an economy of dire scarcity, where only a handful of the well-to-do had them, would the enjoyment of these provisions count as a moral lapse.

✳✳✳ Padatik’s release coincided with Ray’s long-awaited film about the 1943 famine, Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973). Coming at the heels of his two city films, The Adversary and Company Limited, Ashani Sanket, argued Andrew Robinson, dealt with the catastrophe of 1943 primarily as a “rural phenomenon” and contained none of the anguish that Calcutta’s inhabitants suffered. While remaining fascinated with the “subject-matter” of the Bengal Famine,

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whose impact has been compared to that of the Depression in the “industrialized world,” the event, noted Robinson, “left [Ray] comparatively indifferent” at the time it occurred (1943–44).78 Perhaps it was “guilt” at his own indifference, or the recurrence of similar conditions during the movements around food shortages in the mid-1960s that informed Ray’s approach to the film. I invoke Ashani Sanket in the context of this discussion on the history of anger in the Calcutta trilogy because both directors, in a manner of speaking, responded to the quietism that Sen critiques in Calcutta during 1943 when he said “there was stink but not much anger.”79 For Ray, the conditions that produced the famine chronicled the end of the ideal of “sonar bangla” (golden Bengal). For Sen, by contrast, the famine looms as a more global human condition whose past had merged into the present. This explains his repeated return to famine as an idea, from Baishey Sravana (The Wedding Day, 1960) to Akaler Sandhane (In Search of the Famine, 1980) with several city films in between. Seen thus, famine was not about the exploration of individual villainy; its end likewise could not result from the heroic initiative of a single individual. His quest rather was for the anger that he did not see in Calcutta during 1943. The films I have considered are evidence that he found everyday life replete with it; his attempt in the trilogy was to account for its past and understand it as a political emotion. In conclusion, let me turn to an essay by Sen entitled “Itihaser Asraye” (Sheltered by history), that first appeared in Bengali in the 1990s and spoke eloquently to the themes mentioned above. Here we find the clearest articulation of his understanding of famine. Not simply an event that occurred at a particular chronological moment in Indian history, famine was rather a crisis of world historical dimensions. It was characterized not only by a “shortage of food and clothing,” but a “deplorable absence of dignity and decency, . . . honesty and tolerance, of the promise of future generations, of generosity . . . [and] intelligence. And most of all a terrible dearth of dreams and dreamers.” Faced with such a world of an “all-consuming famine of men and their minds . . . bright-eyed young [men] . . . were bewildered and at a loss . . . without any history in which to seek refuge.”80 Sen noted that before coming to Calcutta he “knew that the war had started in Europe in 1939 and about the Japanese attack on China. News about the Spanish Civil War had reached us too and we were aware that . . . famous personalities—artists, authors, poets—had lent their names and support to the faction that demanded democracy.” But “it was only in Calcutta that the despair and terror” of the war and related events “engulfed me.” While the famine has gone down in the annals of Indian history as a human-induced disaster, a glaring instance of poor administration of resources, Sen registered its human dimension. “The entire city was teeming with glimpses of Bengal whose countrysides had been reduced to nothing more than vast burning grounds for the

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dead,” he wrote. “Day after day . . . I witnessed visions from hell that littered the city’s pavements.”81 This sense of the past did not correspond to the history one encountered in books. In the said essay, Sen cited a fictional character from Marxist novelist Debesh Ray’s (1936–2020) Teesta Paarer Brittanta (A tale from the banks of the river Teesta). An argumentative young man, reminiscent of Sen’s protagonist in Padatik, questions an elderly gentleman, presumably someone belonging to the same generation as Sen. “The stories you tell,” he charges, “of war, . . . violence, . . . famine should have scorched your faces with the flames from the funeral pyres . . . But look at you! Every one of you so smug and settled. . . . You seem to have made quite a killing out of this history you are so fond of.” The “events” the older generation claimed to have witnessed “found shelter under the protective folds of a particular history.”82 History, for the fictional youth, as told in textbooks, was a progressive march of time frozen and sanitized as chronological moments in succession. It minimized the scale of the tragedy. Sen shared something of the youth’s concern for liberating history from books, from being reduced to a litany of facts and mechanical developmental processes. The trilogy represented his efforts to connect the past to “events we must witness daily—the deaths, the dying, the killing—on the pavements of this city . . . or splashed across the pages of the newspapers.” At the same time, he acknowledged that the leaders of independent India “possessed no magic wands” with which to “wave away the problems of the people.” Once the “festivities” that accompanied “freedom” were over, the realization seeped in that “nothing had really been solved.” In fact “new problems arose at every level of society and added to the already existing ones.” Thus “refugees from East Bengal who crossed over to this side and crowded our streets and roadways. . . . Before our eyes, the hustle-bustle of the city was replaced by poverty and deprivation, processions and protest marches, unrest and anger.” All this while academic debates raged among “common people and the Planning Commission” alike on “whether the famine was on the decline or not.” The cumulative effects of these developments produced unspeakable anger. In Sen’s words, “And the minute the collective patience snapped, there were incidents of random bombings and callous shootouts. In fact, at one point Emergency had to be declared.”83 While the films under consideration focused on the persistent neocolonialism in the postcolony, the removal of colonial vestiges alone were no guarantee to a better life until the greater problem of the famine— figuratively speaking—was dealt with. Take the example of Maoist rebels and other political leaders emphasizing removing colonial and nationalist era statues in Calcutta. But could the removal of statues alone ensure an erasure of the past? It was more important to probe the ways in which the birth of the new state fundamentally altered, or not, the conditions of daily life for the mass of the populace.

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In light of the above, it is not surprising that for Sen the history of India over the long twentieth century “is best told as a history of poverty.” As he put it in an interview, “the history of India is a continuous history, not of synthesis but of poverty and exploitation.” When asked to clarify whether he believed that the nature of exploitation remained unchanged over time, he noted that his focus was “not exploitation but poverty; how poverty debases human beings, disintegrates the whole pattern, the whole system.” Understanding poverty could provide a key to interpreting the “restlessness, the turbulence of the period that was 1971.” Poverty was the “genesis” to the “anger” that “had not suddenly fallen out of anywhere. It must have a beginning and an end. I wanted to find that genesis and in the process redefine our history.” This is the “extremely political” task he set out to execute in the trilogy. Clarifying the political stakes of such a portrayal, he argued, “as long as you present poverty as something dignified, the establishment will not be disturbed.” Nor will they “act adversely” if poverty was portrayed “as something holy, something divine.” To “define history . . . in its right perspective” meant the depiction of poverty as “unrelenting” and “ruthless.”84 Sen’s angry young man was the embodiment of a complex and contradictory array of the political sentiments outlined above. While this figure has had a rich and enduring life in Indian popular cinema, incarnated through Amitabh Bachchan, it had none of the irony that Sen had packed into his portrayal of the angry young man. Sen’s was an ironical stance that ranged across his portrayal of this figure’s immersion in revolutionary ideology to his obliviousness of skewed gender equations in family and society. Much of the political ambivalence that was constitutive of Sen’s protagonists disappeared from Hindi cinema’s angry young man. It is the genealogy of its previous on-screen life that I have presented above as art films’ apprehension of the postcolonial present.

CHAPTER 6

THE UNTIMELY FILMMAKER Ray’s City Trilogy and a Crisis of Historicism

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here is a stark contrast between the protagonists of Satyajit Ray’s city films, Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971), and Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975), and Apu, whose coming of age and maturation was the subject of his first, magisterial trilogy.1 The future seems indecipherable in the city films, whereas the Apu trilogy, as well as many of Ray’s early works, namely Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958), Devi (The Goddess, 1960), Kanchenjungha (1962), Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), and Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), are propelled by a historicist or developmental sense of history—a complex but forward-moving account of transition, however uneven, into modernity and capitalism. These films chart the development of characters along a recognizable trajectory, with attendant losses, fissures, and conflicts: from the village to the city, from a feudal to a modern society, from superstition to rationality, and from communitarian identity to individual autonomy. Put differently, Ray’s early films made a deliberate connection between the past as a space of experience and the future as a horizon of expectation with the films’ present portrayed as a time of transition.2 The city films, by contrast, are bereft of this sense of historical movement along any clear-cut, prognosticable trajectory. Despite the tremendous contemporary upheaval that all three films register, the present they depict is not a time of transition. It is a feeling of a stalled temporality—a “present tenseness,” to borrow from Jennifer Fay’s description of American film noir—in the midst of flux that marks these films as a break in Ray’s oeuvre.3 Analyzing this break and his films’ inability, at a certain historical moment, to point toward a

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intelligible future, is crucial for an analysis of Ray as a commentator on postcolonial times. As I will demonstrate through this chapter, between Song of the Little Road (1955) and The Middleman (1975), Ray transitioned from a historian working with the cinematic medium to an ethnographer who registered his bafflement with the present by documenting the contemporary as deadlock in the nation’s history. The developmental, modernizing arc of the early films, that is to say their historicist impulse, devolves into a deliberate ethnographic mode with the city films. I draw upon Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s unorthodox, but poetic, description of ethnography as a “commitment to writing from the ground” and as “an impulse to stay open to what’s in your vicinity.” As Berlant and Stewart elucidate, “the ‘ground’ is not just a back-drop or a context; it’s the sensed social-material-aesthetic atmospherics resonant in a scene.”4

Ray’s Early Works: The Long Present An essay written by Mrinal Sen on the occasion of Ray’s last birthday in 1992 offers an apposite point of entry into the question of historical time in Ray’s early works. Sen framed the essay around a letter written to his wife Gita by their son Kunal when the latter was a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Kunal’s letter was occasioned by an animated debate with his friends after they had watched Ray’s Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) at the University of Chicago’s film society, Doc Films. Clearly, the film and discussion afterward unleashed a flood of memories and brought to the fore some unresolved issues for the Bengali graduate student in the U.S. “You had seen it [Aparajito] once before,” Kunal reminded his mother. “Even so, when it came to our local theater, Priya, you and I went to see it again. You wept as you watched the film. Your tears made me teary. When we returned home you said to me ‘when you grow up you too will leave for the world. And I? I will be left alone like Sarbajaya. Then one day you will return to see . . .”5 Years later, Kunal addressed the anxiety buried in the ellipsis. She would not die alone like Sarbajaya, he assured his mother, for he would return to Calcutta as soon as his studies were completed. It was Aparajito’s distinction as a film, noted Sen, that almost four decades since its release, it had the capacity to be a “bridge” between a middle-class Bengali mother in Calcutta and her son pursuing higher education in the natural sciences at an American university. The novel Aparajito, the sequel to Pather Panchali, was published in 1932 and depicted Bengali life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Sen underscored that Ray’s adaptation, while eschewing many details of the literary original, was meticulously realist in its recreation of the ghats of Benares, the rural life of a Bengali widow, and Calcutta. “A work of art is effective,” he wrote, “when it maintains fidelity to its own time and place but is nevertheless able to dissolve all barriers and differences with

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the present to establish identification.”6 Kunal, a modern (adhunik) person, had not seen firsthand the archaic (sekele) Calcutta depicted in Aparajito. And yet “something happens” during the viewing experience that enabled a few Bengali youth in Chicago to effortlessly identify with Apu’s experiences. They “see themselves in a mirror,” spurring the arguments among his friends that Kunal alluded to in the letter: Was it ethical for Bengali male youth in the late 1970s to seek their futures in foreign lands? Were they not consigning their elderly parents to a future of frightening loneliness, as Apu had abandoned his mother, Sarbajaya? Poignant though it is, what drew me to Sen’s letter is not the universal sentiments of love between mother and son it contained. Ray’s works have been praised, criticized, and analyzed at length by scholars and critics for the ways in which they “cherish and communicate the humanity common to all peoples.” While Marie Seton or his early American viewers praised Ray’s capacity to “illuminate the universal human values in ways of life other than our own,” left-leaning critics in India faulted him for an uncritical humanism.7 Film society proceedings, discussed earlier, offer a rich archive of such debates. Sen’s comments are interesting because they flag these ethical questions (in Aparajito) but allude as well to a historical dimension that is less discussed by Ray commentators and scholars: a particular story of development and modernization that makes Sen’s son and Ray’s Apu part of what I call a long present in the history of Bengali modernity. That the present was always a stage in the story of transition to modernity informed much creative work in Bengal between the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. The “theme” of the trilogy, in Ray’s own words from a 1978 interview, was “growth—of a person— from childhood to manhood.” As Ray put it: “The trilogy is more or less the saga of a typical Bengali youth, going through some typical circumstances, being molded by them and reaching certain critical stages in life. ‘Transition’ itself is the strongest link among all three of the films, and it’s represented by the train symbol.”8 Ray’s Apu was a young Bengali boy who moved from the village to the city. Over the course of the trilogy we witness the attenuation of filial ties as Apu pursues western education, eschews the family profession of priesthood to embrace an uncertain but aspirational future, and eventually discovers romantic love after a hastily arranged marriage. That developmental story, I argue, is not Apu’s alone. The histories of transition—often mapped along axes of migration, development, autonomy, romantic love, rationality, and progress—that undergird the Apu trilogy and other early films constituted for a long time the putative present for many middle-class Bengalis. This long present stretches across the nineteenth century into the early decades of the postcolony. In different ways, each film in Ray’s early corpus revolves around a narrative of transition into a capitalist modernity. For example, Devi (1960) stages on the body of its female protagonist a battle between rationalism and

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superstition. Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) is a poignant saga of a dying feudal order being replaced by a ruthless, modern one. Kanchenjungha (1962) offers a robust critique, through the figures of women and unemployed youth, of an upper-class patriarch who rests on laurels bestowed by former colonial overlords. The Big City (1963) is about the travails of a first-generation, middleclass working woman in Calcutta. The criticisms voiced by the protagonist Arati of gender and racial discrimination point to a more equitable, though as yet unattained, future. In these films and in the Apu trilogy, Ray expressed a template for India’s transition from a colony into a developing nation. Broadly Nehruvian in its outline, this template tracked histories of modernization and modernity that linked colonial pasts to postcolonial futures with the present serving as a site of struggles around the transition. With the city films, this well-established script of historical transition is definitively lost. Scholarly analyses on Ray have touched on the question of development and modernization. Animated by a 1980s critique of nationalism, Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Moinak Biswas, and Sourin Bhattacharya, focusing on Song of the Little Road and the trilogy, debated whether or not Apu, an upper-caste, middle-class male, was portrayed as the idealized national subject, and if the trilogy allegorized a “seamless” transition from colonial into national modernity paying scant attention to the trauma that accompanied the birth of the Indian nation due to famine, the partition, and other events.9 Others like Ravi Vasudevan have noted the preeminence given to the “economic domain” over considerations of caste and other social markers in the trilogy, anticipating a sociopolitical order where an unmarked citizen-subject would constitute the democratic norm. Ray’s portrayal of Apu’s transcendence of economic deprivations, a freedom denied to the females of the trilogy, positioned him as the “poet-intelligent . . . standard bearer” of that democratic society.10 Regardless of internal differences in interpretation, the above views nevertheless coalesce around their acknowledgment of a historicist framework in the Apu trilogy. It is seen as a transition narrative into modernity, a “historicist model of history,” even if questions remained about the absence of “violent discontinuity” in the transition.11 Likewise, analysts concur that the late sixties films signaled a dramatic shift in Ray’s filmmaking. For Ravi Vasudevan, the films from Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970) onward evinced “a steady thinning of politically purposeful engagement” in stark contrast with his earlier work. Writing about Days and Nights and The Middleman, specifically, Vasudevan notes, “these films . . . appear to engage the contemporary as a problem of representation, as something which cannot be accessed coherently because the sources of authentication cannot be firmly figured.”12 In a similar vein, Moinak Biswas observes that Ray’s “non-combative view of growth and becoming would gradually become problematic in the wake of the radical dis-identification between social experience and nationalist politics around the mid-1960s.”13 Chandak Sengoopta acknowledges that the late 1960s mark a “remarkable new phase” in

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Ray’s career when he made films that charted “the moral and spiritual collapse of the new urban India . . . and the death of a whole cultural ethos.” His choice of “dark themes, unpleasant characters, and sardonic humor” supposedly left “admirers of the old, serene Ray wondering ‘How does one explain the change in Satyajit?’ ” Contemporary opinions saw the films as symptomatic of “Ray’s failure to commit himself to revolutionary socialism . . . represented [as] the only rational solution for the Indian malaise.”14 Sengoopta, in his fine analysis of The Adversary, suggests that the ambiguous ending of the film with the male protagonist leaving the city for a sleepy mofussil town combined with a funeral chant, was a sign that the hero “had recovered his soul but only by sacrificing his worldly prospects and personal happiness.”15 I agree with these views that Ray’s work from 1970 took a turn away from historicism. But I part ways with them in that I do not believe that this turn was a “thinning of politically purposeful engagement.”16 As Supriya Chaudhuri observes, the city films were “modernist parables.” But they were not “so programmatic” as to make “the story of a single protagonist” the “history of his kind,” instead walking a tightrope of “falling back into the reality they describe, becoming chaotic, unformed, incoherent.”17 Marking the end of what I have termed the long present, these films express their political stance in Ray’s unequivocal refusal to see the “chaotic, unformed, incoherent” quality of contemporary urban reality as instantiating any emancipatory metanarrative of human history. The debates about whether or not Ray was a “political” filmmaker stemmed, I argue, from the dissolution of the long present in which there was shared ground between the filmmaker and his viewers. Innumerable Bengali viewers of the early films identified with Ray’s reading of the past and with his intimations about the future. That consensus dissolved from 1970. Starting then, Ray’s cinema reflected an artist genuinely confounded about the possibility of any transition from the present. Contemporaries who found him lacking in radical conviction were sanguine about the possibilities for social transformation offered by a left-leaning politics, an assurance that in hindsight we know was deeply problematic.18 Ray, could from this time onward only speak of politics as corruption. “I find politics a very, very confused and changeable thing, and I think there is something corrupt about politics. People I am friendly with belong to the left, inevitably, but in a moment of crisis I have seen them not act in the desirable way.”19 He distinguished that confused, changeable, corrupt thing called “politics” from the identification he felt with the “triangle” comprising Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore.20 That inheritance, the ballast for his optimistic historicism, is absent from his city films. Ray, the filmmaker, appeared to have turned into a documentarian, his art answering to Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s aphorism that “it takes a lot more than clarity to keep someone going; there’s more at stake than just knowing.”21 In their avowed inability to chart out a historicist, developmental narrative of the postcolonial nation, Ray’s city films were unlike Sen’s Calcutta trilogy,

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which sought to understand and represent certain issues plaguing the postcolonial nation of India by placing youth, anger, and poverty in the context of a global history of the left in the twentieth century. To what resources, devices, and departures did Ray resort to in order to communicate his sense of having abandoned any sense of the future that he had until then shared with his middleclass audience? This is the question I pursue in the rest of the chapter by focusing on issues of adaptation, and the use of particular filmic devices, the soundtrack, and questions of gender.

Stories and Adaptations The three city films were adapted from works of fiction by popular authors, Sunil Ganguly (1934–2012) and Mani Sankar Mukherjee (1933–), better known as Sankar. In a letter to Marie Seton written on October 15, 1969, Ray shares his early plans about The Adversary: “I’ve just read the new novel by Ganguly (the writer of Days and Nights in the Forest) about present day youth in Calcutta which I find fascinating and cinematically challenging. It would be nice to be able to make a definitive film about modern Calcutta—working entirely with non-pros, before I move out of this place and try to find somewhere else to strike roots.”22 Wanting to leave Calcutta, “a nightmare city,” for Bombay or Madras was a refrain in his letters from these years. Here is another example from October 6, 1971, where Ray reveals his deep frustration about the city as he describes to Seton the condition of the film studios in Tollygunge, Tollygunge has been turned into a “liberated zone” by Naxalites. The revolutionaries have actually been living in the studios using make up rooms, editing rooms, etc. for storing ammunition. This led to constant police raids, followed by arrests and fights . . . until two of the biggest studios including New Theatres had to close down. It’s only recently that the police have been able to round up the leaders and shoot them down. The whole thing has taken on a nightmare quality—more so because people seem to be getting used to killings of the most macabre sort. And it’s increasingly becoming difficult to make out the political murders from the non-political ones. Unless the situation improves I may have to move to Bombay or Madras.23

Ray never left Calcutta; he wrote later that it was “the place to work, the place to live, so you take what comes—you accept the fact of change.”24 An acceptance of city life, replete with everyday violence, shambling infrastructure, corruption, and a lack of political will to rectify such conditions come through in the Calcutta trilogy. Works by Ganguly and Sankar allowed Ray to capture the specificities of the contemporary city, as they were much more in tune with the

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pulse of the postcolonial Calcutta than the cache of writers on whose works Ray based his earlier films. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, and Rajsekhar Basu were hallowed names in Bengali literature. Their writings, however, were not shot through with the sense of fatality and urban anomie that the later authors projected. Even Narendranath Mitra, whose The Big City was the basis for Ray’s 1963 film, held out an element of hope in the companionate couple and the values of care embodied in the extended family. The city trilogy stripped these institutions bare of any comparable instances of tenderness and optimism. Ganguly, who later in his life became a leading mainstream Bengali writer, began his career as a literary rebel. A refugee from Faridpur in East Bengal (present day Bangladesh), he was intimately familiar with life in the numerous colonies that mushroomed in Calcutta around the partition of 1947 and continued to expand through the 1960s. Ray had previously adapted another of Ganguly’s novels for his film Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), ostensibly because in the late sixties he wanted to work on something that would take him away from Calcutta. At the same time, he did not want to return to a rural setting like Song of the Little Road’s “Nischindipur.”25 Days and Nights was a film about a group of urban youth briefly removed from their habitat into natural surroundings. Upon completing that film and his next, a fantasy entitled Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1969), Ray returned once more to Calcutta. As he noted in the preface to a selected set of English translations of Ganguly’s works, I happened upon The Adversary at a time when I was looking not just for any suitable subject, but for a subject of a specific type. This was early in 1970. The urban scene was dominated by the youth—whether in politics, on the fringe of it, or out of it. Joblessness, cynicism, the clash of generations, seething discontent exploding into violence . . . one couldn’t help reacting to it all, and going one step further, wishing to put some of this into a film. It was Sunil Ganguly’s The Adversary which provided the springboard to turn that wish into reality.26

In an article written in 1992, Ganguly confessed that The Adversary was first published in a journal so unrenowned that even though he was its author, he had forgotten its name.27 Recent research reveals it as the magazine Sajghar. Subsequently, in 1969, Signet published The Adversary as a book.28 Ganguly recalls feeling skeptical about Ray’s ability to depict “the unemployed or rebellious youth” whose world was the film’s subject. What did Ray know about the ignominy of unemployment? He had no firsthand acquaintance with left-leaning, Naxalite youth in colleges who embraced a cult of violence. How could he possibly portray them on screen? Ganguly regarded himself a seasoned veteran of

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the “farce” called the job interview that plays such an important role in the trilogy. His younger brother, like Tunu in The Adversary, was deeply embroiled in Naxalite politics. Having watched the film, he conceded that what Ray lacked in actual experience he made up for by his keen powers of observation.29 The impression of “lived experience” is produced through meticulous attention to myriad details of city life—graffiti, youth culture, educated unemployment, campus unrest, an underbelly of prostitution and gambling, overcrowded public transport, road rage, alienation between generations, and rebellious sexuality. The Adversary, that released on October 29, 1970, is a film set around some days in the life of Siddhartha Chaudhuri, a recent graduate (BSc) in Botany who is forced to drop out of medical school after his father’s death. He lives in a cramped joint family home with his younger siblings, Tunu and Tapu, and his mother and uncle. The film’s diegesis is flanked by two failed job interviews and comprises Siddhartha’s interactions with his friends, family, a budding love interest, and his many wanderings in the city. Company Limited and The Middleman were adaptations of Bengali novels by Sankar, written during the years 1970 to 1973, but later published as a trilogy entitled Swarga Marta Patal. Sankar, a popular Bengali writer of thirty-seven novels, five travel books, children’s books, essays, and devotional works, noted in his preface to the trilogy that “another name for the educated middle-class in this country is the salariat. It is to inform the reader of literature of the untold tales of joy and sorrow, justice and injustice, honor and insult that accumulate like a heavy stone in the hearts of thousands that I first embarked on this project.”30 The Middleman, although written last in 1973, appeared as the first story in the collection. Sankar saw the world of this novel as representing the depths of patal (nether world). He followed it with Company Limited, which approximates martya (earth). Ray’s films reversed the order of novels. Sankar’s best-known work is undoubtedly Chowringhee, which was made into a hugely successful film in 1968 featuring the Bengali matinee idol, Uttam Kumar. Sankar’s background gives us a sense of the worlds portrayed in his works. From being a street hawker and typewriter cleaner, he rose to become a clerk to a British barrister named Noel Barwell. Through the latter he was exposed to the “high life of the rich and famous.”31 As Barwell’s employee, he lived in the servant’s quarter of a big Calcutta hotel where he had “a greenroom view of cabaret dancers, the private lives of celebrities” that inspired the plot of Chowringhee. Indeed, it colored the moral and social universe of most of his works. His novels were populated by “types”: hard-bitten, lonely, single women, world-weary youth, and garrulous, mid-level, and corrupt functionaries. Ray, who excelled in portraying character types on-screen, must have been drawn to these aspects of his work as well as to the author’s modernist descriptions of characters walking in the seedy by-lanes and frequenting the labyrinthine office buildings of Calcutta.32 Sankar was also no stranger to the corporate world,

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having worked for many years with the R. P. Goenka group that owned the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation and was a major manufacturer of tires, tea, and records, among other things. Corporate machinations cast their shadow on the plot of Company Limited and, to some extent, The Middleman. Company Limited released on September 24, 1971. Both novel (written the year before, in 1970) and film explore the depths to which Shyamalendu Chatterjee, a young, up-and-coming corporate executive, sinks to secure a place in his company’s board of directors. The drama develops in the days that his beautiful and intelligent sister-in-law, Tutul, in the throes of indecision about her own relationship with a left-leaning activist, comes to visit with the dashing Shyamalendu and his wife. Tutul’s attraction for Shyamalendu, and its collapse, run parallel with the unfolding of his heinous machinations. The Middleman was first published in 1973 in the Bengali periodical Desh. The film released on February 20, 1976, at the height of the Emergency. It is also the only one of Ray’s films to be certified “A” by the censor board, restricting its audience to those who were eighteen years or older. There were attempts to sabotage its release by Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the chief minister of West Bengal, who tried to portray it as “anti-government and pro-revolution,” citing in particular the sequence of a corrupt Congress leader sitting under a portrait of Mrs. Gandhi and multiple visual references to Mao Zedong.33 The Middleman returns to the crisis of educated unemployment and has the young graduate Somnath enter the murky world of “order/supply” when government and other clerical jobs prove elusive. In his desperation to land a contract, Somnath has to arrange the sexual services of a call girl for a potential client. In the film’s penultimate sequence, he realizes, to his horror, that the girl in question is the sister of his close friend. Writers such as Sunil Ganguly and Sankar were immensely popular authors whose works merged literary modernism and pulp fiction. Both were eventually affiliated with the literary establishment of the Ananda Bazar Patrika and were household names among the Bengali bhadralok. Compared to the literary works on which Ray based his earlier films, the ones by Ganguly and Sankar had more “cinematicity,” features that Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau argue make other media forms—literature, scriptwriting, aerial photography, and gaming—cinematic. Ray expressed something similar when he explained his choice of the “modern” stories on which the three city films were based: Particularly with the modern stories I have chosen for films like Company Limited or The Adversary, certainly The Middleman, the original novels were second rate, not really strong, in fact with lots of weak patches and on the whole poor in conception. The reason I chose them was because they had elements which fascinated me, which struck me as being usable in film. Those were retained and then the rest was transformed in the process of writing the screenplay.34

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Critical literature does not recognize the extent to which Ray really kept up with writing by popular Bengali authors as well as English pulp fiction. About Company Limited he said, “Then last year I read the novel Company Limited is based on, and I immediately thought that this was an important theme. After describing the young man looking for a job in The Adversary, it was relevant for me to describe the people who have control over their jobs, the new upper class, the new breed that has grown up in India since Independence.”35 A close reader of Ray’s own popular writings, such as the Feluda detective stories or other short stories, will have noted the presence of Ellery Queen or James Hadley Chase in those books.36 That he would weave some of the aesthetic influences of those crime thrillers back into his own works is entirely plausible.

Narrating the Contemporary Formally, the city trilogy featured devices that were quite different from those that were regarded as Ray’s signature from previous films—slow narrative progression; a preference for colonial era plots; extensive use of music, both diegetic and nondiegetic, vocal and instrumental; and sparse dialogue. The city films are faster paced. They abound in freezes, dream sequences, scenes in negative, flashbacks, flash forwards, low-key lighting, dialogue, and jagged sound motifs. These formal departures are especially interesting coming at a time when the director was involved in a set of intense polemics on the Indian “new wave” discussed in chapter 2. Chidananda Dasgupta registered surprise when he observed, The Adversary marks many firsts in Ray’s career. For the first time, he uses what, in rather acrimonious public debates with Mrinal Sen, he had earlier condemned as “gimmicks.” The film opens in negative, and goes into it at many points, notably when the nurse prostitute is about to take off her bra. There are sudden, brief flashbacks to Siddhartha’s medical education; for instance, when a well-endowed girl crosses the street, there is a cut to a medical diagram of the female breast, together with a technical explanation by a teacher. There are flashes of wish-fulfillment scenes, such as Siddhartha beating up his sister’s boss. It is as if Ray is out to prove that when it comes to gimmicks, he can invent them just as well as anyone else, perhaps better.37

These departures are not so surprising if we consider them in terms of the sheer diversity of genres that mark Ray’s oeuvre. During 1970–75, the period of the trilogy, Ray also made his first Feluda (the detective hero) film, Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress, 1974); Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), a historical film on the Bengal famine; and two documentaries, Sikkim (1971) and The Inner Eye

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6.1 Satyajit Ray’s gimmicks: Siddhartha with the nurse, a scene in negative, The Adversary.

(1972). While the detective film was dismissed as frivolous by many critically minded viewers,38 the city trilogy elicited comparisons with Sen’s Interview and Calcutta 71.39 The following lengthy comment from Dasgupta is representative of the kind of reception that both Ray’s and Sen’s films met with during the time, and for a considerable period after. Indeed, these were the standard templates for discussing art cinema in the 1960s to the 1970s, invariably bifurcating along binaries of politics and culture, optimism and realist portrayal, formal innovation and narrative acuity. Partisanship of their respective admirers ran high, often divided according to political affiliations, the radicals favouring Sen’s treatment, and criticising the weaknesses of the Ray hero and his escape from the battle-front. . . . In retrospect, despite its obvious faults, and its uncharacteristic gimmicks, the Ray film emerges as the more serious in tone. The strongly built final interview helps to reinforce its reality, and the vacillations of its hero seem true to a stage in the social evolution of the more sensitive sections of the educated middle class. His defeat seems to have more reality and substance than the defiant gesture of Sen’s protagonist. . . . Sen expresses his own attitude more forcefully, where Ray remains a chronicler of the times.40

6.2 Satyajit Ray’s gimmicks: skeletons to men, last interview sequence, The Adversary.

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Dasgupta was using an implicitly evolutionary model of history here to judge the Bengali middle classes. He was still historicizing and, having missed Ray’s refusal to do the same, read the films as naive chronicles. While the trilogy does indeed put on the record the contemporary urban condition, much like newspaper reports, this was a deliberate methodological choice whose historicalphilosophical import appears to have been lost on Dasgupta. Ray was no journalist. Crafting the city films as chronicles, without offering a theory of historical change, was the product of considered epistemological reflection. Unlike Sen’s films, they do not purport to point to a way forward, despite the plethora of detail they offer on contemporary conditions. They are so deliberately open-ended that it would appear as if Ray’s intent was to reveal the hubris and/or inanity of those who were assured of ideological clarity in their interpretation of the times. Why did Ray come to see his role as a chronicler of the contemporary as adequate instead of putting forth possible solutions, “forcefully,” like Sen? Viewers familiar with works such as Devi, Jalsaghar, Apur Sansar, or The Big City know that Ray did not lack in forcefulness of ideological expression even if he always portrayed opposing views with empathy. In Chandak Sengoopta’s words, “Ray’s narratives . . . are all-embracing but they are never all-forgiving.”41 Going a step forward, we should ask what modes Ray deployed to give the city trilogy the character of a contemporary chronicle? Microhistorical details crowd the mise-en-scène of the city trilogy despite the leanness of their narratives. They create a palimpsest that enrich the viewer’s sense of the films especially if she can spot, decode, and analyze their significance in the milieu of Calcutta in the early 1970s. These details establish the city films as a new genre for Ray: ethnography. Let me offer a rapid walk through some select details to communicate the density of the social-material atmospherics in these filmic city chronicles.42

Snapshots The Adversary contains a sequence where the protagonist Siddhartha and a friend go to a film society screening of a Swedish film, Flickorna (The Girls, Mai Zetterling, 1968), although the only details about it shared in the film were that it was “Swedish” and uncensored. The brief film-within-a-film is a signpost of contemporary youth culture. Informed audiences were aware that watching non-Hollywood, non-English language films in cine clubs that mushroomed around the city were touted as a sign of political radicalism in those years. They were also motivated, as testified to by many contemporary accounts, by the desire to watch sexually explicit scenes of uncensored movies recalling Galt and Schoonover’s account of an “impure” spectator.43 The single wink with which Siddhartha’s friend entices him to the screening encapsulates a layered history of youthful desires.

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Myriad such details bring to life Calcutta’s urban culture. The city’s soccer fever shows up in a scene from The Middleman where Sukumar and Somnath’s attention is on the just-concluded match between arch rivals East Bengal and Mohun Bagan as they loiter outside the Victoria Memorial exchanging stories of failures in the job market.44 The crisis in the health sector is similarly invoked in passing when the unemployed Sukumar and his little brother Pintu are shown taking little white homeopathic pills for the “viral” infection they have been suffering for days. Historians of science have documented that in the colonial and postcolonial period, homeopathy, commonly regarded as a “European pseudo-science,” was clubbed together with other “heterodox” practices such as phrenology, magnetism, mesmerism, hydrology, and herbalism on the one hand, and “indigenous” Indian practices such as yunani, ayurveda, and siddha on the other. It enjoyed a lesser status as “scientific” medicine and was considerably cheaper.45 Ray folds this complex history into the passing reference to homeopathy by an impoverished youth like Sukumar who lives in slum-like conditions with his parents in what he described as “his father’s hotel.” Calcutta streets were replete with dangers: some casual, others lethal. One risked a hard fall like Somnath by slipping on a casually dropped banana peel as many urban denizens used the city streets for garbage disposal.46 Or one could witness angry mobs, like in The Adversary, mercilessly beating up the driver of a car for a small accident. Bomb throwing, gheraos,47 strikes, and lockouts dot the narratives of all three films, invoking the danger of faceless crowds whose energies can quickly turn into violence. An incomplete list of this kind of quotidian violence in the trilogy includes: a bomb blast that disrupts Siddhartha’s attempt to nap at the air-conditioned Metro theater; his spontaneous participation in beating up an unknown chauffeur after a street accident; Dolanchapa’s unselfconscious retelling to her younger sister that she hears bombs going off on the streets from the heights of her plush high-rise in Company Limited; a corrupt company official causing grievous injury to an elderly watchman by having a bomb thrown inside the factory precinct to deliberately orchestrate a lockout in the same film; Sukumar slapping his sister Kauna on the face for undressing in front of the window in The Middleman. Crucial to the reproduction of Calcutta’s atmospherics was also Ray’s attention to the crisis in infrastructure. Ray touches on overcrowding in public transport, power cuts, filthy streets, defaced property, and incessant noise in all three films. The soundscape of the films is important in evoking a sense of the city. The daytime sequences reproduce the din of the city with low-key, dull background noise that is a combination of Hindi film songs (“Mera Joota Hai Japani” in The Adversary, for example), sounds of slogans being chanted in political rallies, automobile horns, radios, and microphones. Restive Calcutta nights are invoked with the barks and howls of street dogs and stray cats that persist until someone, like Siddhartha, awakened by his private nightmares,

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6.3 Advertisement for Hindusthan Peters, electric fans division, headed by Shyamalendu, Company Limited. Ray’s own graphic design.

shoos them away.48 The erasure of these sounds inside of Shyamalendu Chatterjee’s high-rise apartment in Company Limited draws attention to class divisions constitutive of the city. Indeed, the film is set within an upwardly mobile corporate culture that included country clubs, posh restaurants, beauty parlors, and advertising agencies. No doubt, Ray drew on his experience as a graphic artist at D. J. Keymer, which later became the well-known ad agency Clarion, in Company Limited. Sometimes, Ray inverts the logic of nineteenth-century visual histories that Tom Gunning argues have carried over into cinema: aerial photography connoting a bird’s eye view of the city, and ground-level images showing the city from a “mole’s eye point of view.”49 The aerial view of Calcutta, seen in The Adversary, includes some colonial and postcolonial landmarks such as the Victoria memorial, Birla Planetarium, Dalhousie Square, the maidan, as well as a vast political rally confirming Calcutta’s reputation as a city of processions.50 The juxtaposition of the procession with the backdrop of Calcutta’s landmarks, seen through the gaze of the couple atop the then-tallest building in Calcutta, produces an image of the city not as a totality, as in a bird’s-eye view, but as fragments.51

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Infrastructural shortages, instead of providing mute backdrops, have a vital role in the trilogy. The opening sequence of The Adversary lingers on Siddhartha’s bus ride to the film’s first job interview. Seven years earlier, The Big City (1963) also opened with its male protagonist’s ride on a tram. The sharp contrast between the two sequences demonstrated the massive stress that had accrued on the city’s public transportation system within the space of a few years.52 Not even the rich and powerful were inured to the squeeze of shortages. Company Limited offers an eloquent account of this in the last scenes when, having secured his promotion to the rank of director in Hindusthan Peters by fomenting an illegal lockout at the factory, a joyous but morally compromised Shyamalendu returns home, only to be met with an “out of order” sign on the door of the elevator of his apartment building. Ray’s attention to power cuts, overcrowded public transport, widespread unemployment, and poorly lit and repaired streets in the trilogy may be read as signs of the postcolonial state’s failure to exercise effective “infrastructural power” as distinct from “despotic power.” The former, according to Michael Mann, was “the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society, and to

6.4 Shyamalendu takes

the stairs due to a power cut, Company Limited.

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implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm.”53 In keeping with the chronicle-like quality, Ray does not propose either causes or solutions to these matters. He simply documents that the promise of what India’s Minister of Works, Mines, and Power Narhar Vishnu Gadgil, in December  1947, described as a “modern . . . social service state” as opposed to a “police state,” an idea endorsed by the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, did not materialize.54 The utopian drive of “fossil developmentalism”— embodied in such statements as “electrical energy is something more than a commodity; it is the very life blood of the industrial nation which must flow abundantly and without interruption if the nation’s strength and well-being are to be preserved”—turned dystopian in a 1970s Calcutta plagued by acute shortages of electricity.55 Another key contemporary narrative detail of the trilogy is the job interview. They are present in all three films although the amount of screen time devoted to the interview varies in each case. The films contain extensive descriptive sequences on the lead up to the interview that build up anxiety and highlight the randomness of the entire application process: crowds of jobless people thronging outside the employment exchange offices; a focus on paraphernalia such as forms, stamps, and passport photos that had to be affixed on the applications; the groveling colonial style of an application letter (“I beg to apply”); candidates making their way to a job interview on crowded public transport or on foot; the wait outside the interview chambers in stifling heat; inadequate seating arrangements; lack of drinking water; and so on. These realist details evoke a system in which one is forced to participate but not permitted to become a meaningful stakeholder. But they are also interspersed with modernist touches, “gimmicks,” such as the use of the negative when Ray shows the mass of male bodies waiting for an interview turn into human skeletons. Ray relies heavily on dialogue to produce effects of inertia and arbitrariness characteristic of the system. Following Prathama Banerjee, we may label these realist/modernist effects as “mundane-ism”: “a mode of staging common life so as to expose the conflict, drama, and even absurdity at the very heart of the mundane.”56 For example, as they wait for an interview in The Adversary, a first-time job seeker asks Siddhartha whether the interview would be conducted in English or Bengali; in another scene a candidate of a just-concluded interview is thronged by others who quiz him about the questions he was asked. Questions such as: “What is your aim in life?,” “Where is Bonn?,” or “What is the weight of the moon?” for a clerical position suggest educational qualifications have little bearing on the success of an application. In the face of these daily injustices, Ray’s protagonists, unlike Mrinal Sen’s, do not explode with anger. Their anger quickly gives way to resignation, retreat, and eventually, development of skills to game the system. In seemingly

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6.5 Siddhartha exhausted by his interview ordeal, The Adversary.

abrogating the portrayal of revolutionary anger, Ray’s commitment to provide a minute description of the contemporary condition flies in the face of expectations that a progressive cinema was a force that would effect social and political change. When the contemporary felt like an impasse, the filmmaker turned ethnographer. In several conversations, Ray dismissed the notion that films brought about “social change.” “That is not my intention in any event,” he clarified. His “intention” was to “present problems in my own way . . . and help people to understand them, so that they can do their own thinking.” He balked from suggesting resolutions to the audience “because I don’t know the solutions. If I did, I would not be a filmmaker; I would be a politician or something like that.”57 This was probably why, of the two brothers in The Adversary, he expressed his sympathies toward the elder one, Siddhartha, who is a “a human being with doubts.” To Ray the capacity to express doubt mattered more than affiliation with a political movement whose members, he argued, were more likely “depending on the directives from higher figures who are dictating, controlling their movement.”58 Siddhartha echoes Ray’s own disillusionment with the postcolonial contemporary. As he stated in 1969, When we talk about political consciousness, we can also mean the consciousness one has about the futility of the methods used by politicians—that is

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the way things stand today. I don’t think there can be anything but a disillusionment about politics in general, everything around us that goes by the name of “politics” and the face of those who do politics with which we are familiar—(but) I think there is real need to be acutely conscious about what is going on around you.59

New Strategies Having lost faith in established political programs—liberal, socialist, nationalist—and the progressive arcs each entailed, Ray turned to thick description. In terms of film practice, this meant tweaking some common features of Indian cinema. The opening sequence of the films and his radical use of the song deserve particular attention in this context. The opening sequence of each film is much longer than those of Ray’s early films, which run between 1.5 and 3 minutes. By contrast, The Adversary’s opening sequence is 4:28, Seemabaddha’s, 8:23, and The Middleman’s, 6:03 minutes, with voiceovers, dialogue, and contemporary contextual information packed into them. If Raymond Bellour is right that the opening sequences in Ray’s oeuvre determine much of what follows, then we need to probe the reasons for the thick description of Calcutta we get at the start of each film in the trilogy.60 This has to do with conveying a sense of the present as a deadlock with no conceivable escape in sight. A brief description of the long opening sequence of The Middleman will help illustrate the issue. Packed with activity and detail, it generates a sense of stasis rather than change. The title credits roll on screen in white letters against a dark backdrop. The silence is broken by the sound of slow-moving footsteps. The camera tilts down to a headshot of a bored, sweaty, middle-aged man framed against a blackboard. As we move into a medium long shot, we see the gentleman flanked by long white walls sprayed with graffiti of the Naxalite movement (1969–71) that roiled college campuses in Calcutta. Slogans such as “The seventies are the decade of liberation,” “Armed struggle is the only path to liberation for the proletariat,” “Finish off the class enemies,” and crude portraits of Mao Zedong cover the walls of a classroom where an examination is in progress. Graffiti inside and outside buildings—houses, educational, medical and other institutions— was the rebellious intrusion of the politicized public into the spaces of the postcolonial commons. The revolutionary words ring hollow as we see all but one of the students cheating in plain view of the two examiners who signal complete resignation to the farce unfolding before their eyes. The noncheater’s exceptionalism already seems doomed in this setting. Newspapers of this period are rife with reports of violence against teachers, strikes on campuses, and incidents of mass copying in examinations—issues that Ray compresses into

6.6 The opening sequence of The Middleman, from Ray’s red book (khero khata).

6.7 Introductory sequence, mass cheating during a BA examination, The Middleman.

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the title sequence.61 He intersperses the latter half of the six-minute sequence with four freeze frames of boisterous students and helpless-looking teachers as if to draw an analogy between his film and the catatonic system—teeming human action on the surface but no transformation. Another stock device whose new use in the trilogy marked its distance from earlier films is the song. The Middleman is the only film in the trilogy that features songs. The film’s first song is a bhajan, a religious song performed at a gathering that Somnath attends with the fixer, Mr. Natabar Mittir. The second is a rabindrasangeet, “Chaya ghanaiche bane bane / gagan e gagan e daake deya” (Shadows are gathering in the forests / clouds rumbling in the skies). Ray’s use of rabindrasangeet in The Middleman thoroughly differs from Ghatak’s discussed earlier, and even from his own deployment of them in previous films like Charulata (1964).62 Named after the author of the verses, rabindrasangeet is generally associated with romanticism.63 They variously invoke love between human beings; longing for union with the divine and/or nature, the latter regarded as an extension of god; celebration of the seasons; and sorrow, loss, pain, and patriotism. The lyrics of Chaya ghanaiche describe the beauty of the monsoons. It was composed in 1923 and belongs to the repertoire of songs entitled “Prakriti” (Nature). In a tightly woven stanza, the song invokes the beauty of dark clouds laden with rain, the roar of thunder, and flowers that come to life in the rainy season. To appreciate its impact within the film, the specific meaning of the song is as important as is Tagore’s place in the Bengali imagination for the greater part of the twentieth century. Tagore remains the most celebrated Bengali poet. Learning rabindrasangeet was, until recently, near compulsory in the upbringing of middle-class Bengalis, especially women. The wide appeal of Tagore’s music and poetry carried over from his lifetime to later periods, aided in no small measure by the dissemination of his songs via gramophone, radio, and eventually music schools and departments in universities even when the sentiments they conveyed were far removed from “middle-class realities.” The continued relevance and popularity of Tagore songs in Bengali lifeworlds is attributed to their capacity to transfigure the everyday. It has been argued that Tagore songs offered ways of coping with the city: its drab, bewildering, and disagreeable aspects. The power of rabindrasangeet inhered in their capacity to libidinize the materiality of the Bengali language in a way that, through music and lyric, one remained in the present but also experienced momentary separation from it. Poetry and song produced moments of epiphany that “confounded any historicist expectations one might have of modernism as following and replacing romanticism in the history of modern cities.”64 Ghatak used this capacity of Tagore songs to produce a sense of epiphany to transport his viewers from the worldly “now-time” of the film into a different temporality of archetypes and myths. But Ray subverted these aspects of the

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reception of Tagore’s songs. His radical use of rabindrasangeet stands out as a modernist moment not only in his oeuvre, but also in Indian art cinema more generally. The song in The Middleman portends the protagonist Somnath’s slide into corruption. Earlier that day, Somnath learned from Natabar Mittir, the exceptionally resourceful and ruthless “public relations” agent, that in order to seal a lucrative deal, he would have to organize sexual favors for their client. “I will bring you the maal,” Mittir told him, and you need to hand it over to Goenka. Maal literally means goods/chattel and is a crude (and sexist) way of referring to women. We hear the first strains of the song playing on a radio as Somnath considers the implications of being a pimp, a trafficker of women, to establish his business. Ray also departs from the standards of song picturization in Indian cinema by foregrounding the source of the sound, in this instance the radio. He calibrates the relationship between the aural and visual to one of equal importance, a departure from tendencies in Indian cinema that gave primacy to the former over the latter.65 The radio and a flame flickering in front of it occupy the frame as the song fills the soundtrack. The voice of Sharmila Roy Pommot, who sang the playback, and a darkened side profile of Somnath’s father fill the frame. He is seated on a chair next to the radio, his visage clouded with unspoken worry about his younger son’s future. The flame, we realize, is from a candle burning in front of the radio next to a ticking table clock. As the viewer takes in the fixtures of middle-class households, she is aware that there is load shedding, or a power outage, and that it likely occurred daily as everything about Somnath’s father’s comportment and the half-burned candle signals routine. The camera then cuts to another moving flame—this time a candle carried across the frame by his sister-in-law to a table in the next room, where Somnath is seated. Illuminated by the light of a single candle, Somnath’s face appears, darkened both by the surroundings and worry, his sunken eyes staring fixedly at the flame. He refuses his boudi’s suggestion of speaking to his father to assuage the older man’s anxieties, but begins a conversation with her as the sound of the song grows indistinct, fading into the background noise of a middle-class Bengali household. His job, he tells her, flicking his index finger in and out of the flame, is designated in Bengali as dalali (pimping). The semantic density of the word dalal is worth pausing over. In her monograph on crowd politics in Bangladesh, Nusrat Chowdhury translates dalal as “collaborator,” those compromised figures, often Bengali, that plotted with the state of West Pakistan against the East’s struggle for a Bengali homeland. Sharing some common features with Walter Benjamin’s “intriguer,” the dalal, whose “origin and location remained mostly within the boundaries of the local,” was “a personification of moral laxity and transgression.”66 In the context of Kolkata in the early 1970s, the figure of the dalal also connoted a broker. Somnath’s usage captured the historic contempt that middle-class educated people

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6.8 Somnath reflecting on his slide into corruption, The Middleman.

had for brokers. This in itself is not without irony for a trading city, which, after all, should be crawling with brokers. Implicit in his disgust for the category is an idea that a dalal is a middleman, not a producer of wealth or value, but someone who simply takes a cut. Industrialists produce wealth, the bhadralok produce values, and the dalals neither.67 “You have not chosen this job,” his sister-in-law responds with a reassuring smile that skillfully disguises her realization about Somnath’s slippery line of work. As Somnath moves further into the shadows, his profile is reflected on a mirror. Suddenly, the lights come back on, relieving the characters as well as the viewers of the oppressive weight of the situation. With some relief in his voice, Somnath remarks on how depressing it is to return home to no electricity. His tone and the rapid shifting of emotional registers also signals that the moral dilemma he was facing is resolved. “Your brother will find a Sanskrit word for dalali and everything will be all right and I will look for a suitable girl as soon as the contract is finalized,” says his boudi, putting a final seal on the topic as the sound of the song grows distinct once more. Collocating the words of the song with the words spoken by the actors generates dark and sardonic emotions, quite unlike the romanticism associated with rabindrasangeet. The capacity of Tagore songs to transfigure the real is not merely bypassed but utterly defeated in this instance. Ray’s deployment of

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the song in a meticulously realist register makes rabindrasangeet a banal fixture of urban everyday life, while the mismatch between the words of the song and the mise-en-scène indicates that the real is too obdurate to be transfigured. In the present, Tagore songs had become a matter of unreflective habit. They assumed a compulsory, ritual function in contexts like arranged marriage and employment. Instead of the attentive listening required of rabindrasangeet, Ray makes the song a part of the soundscape of an urban home during a power cut. The song’s descriptions of the dark beauty of the rain and monsoon clouds are bathetic in the context of load shedding. Playing in the stuffy, dark interior of a Bengali home during a power cut, the sublimity of the song transmogrifies into despondent background noise. “Tagore never wrote the song for such a context; but in Ray’s juxtaposition it acquires a shattering impact,” noted Chidananda Dasgupta. In this final film of the Calcutta trilogy, Tagore’s separation from Calcutta’s present in the 1970s—and the death of the long present in which he was a living resource for middle-class Bengalis—was sealed.

The Women’s Question Abandoned / The Crisis in Bengali Masculinity The crisis of Ray’s historicism is nowhere more acutely displayed than in his abandonment of the “women’s question.” His early works demonstrated an abiding interest and commitment to women’s position in modernity and modernization. There was even an archetypal “Ray woman,” a normative female subject that emerged from his early corpus.68 He articulated her characteristics as follows: “Although they’re physically not as strong as men, nature gave women qualities which compensate for the fact. They’re more honest, more direct, and by and large, they’re stronger characters. I’m not talking about every woman but . . . the woman I like to put in my films is better able to cope with situations than men.”69 Charulata was the archetypal Ray woman. “At the end of the film Charu is established as a figure of self-consolidation,” observes Keya Ganguly, even though “self-knowledge” is exacted at the steep price of her marital life. It was perhaps her self-consciousness that modernity is a one-way street from which there is no turning back, or in Ganguly’s words, being reconciled “to the burden of being a nabeena (modern woman) rather than a pracheena (traditional woman),” that made Ray’s Charulata markedly different from the literary original upon which the film was based.70 Ray’s early films variously engaged with the project of the “new patriarchy” that arose in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The ideology of “new patriarchy” was an uneasy and contingent compromise between two extremes—a Western-inspired romantic model of the couple and the nuclear family, and an Indian extended family that gave little ideational space to the

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couple.71 The films of his early corpus directly address such issues as the status of the couple in the joint family, the place of the educated and/or working woman in such a family, and questions of modern subjectivity in a rapidly modernizing society. Thus, in Charulata and The Big City, the emergence of women as modern subjects is mapped through education, writing, employment, and protest, even as that emergence places tremendous pressure on the couple and the family. The World of Apu and Devi explored the possibilities of, and challenges to, companionate romantic love within the form of arranged marriage. Considered together, Ray’s early films offered rich insights into histories of modern conjugality, family, and the self in colonial and early postcolonial India, including tragic reflections on those who were unable to enter into the developmental arc, such as the women in Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956). The city films represent the end of that project of individual, societal, and historical development. Women in the city films, on the other hand, are ciphers, an admission perhaps of the fact that Ray was more confounded by the “new” women he actually saw around him than he was by men. The films are centered on the male protagonists. Men’s complexities and quirks are fleshed out in much greater detail than women’s, even when the latter occupy considerable screen time and space, as in Company Limited. Women, insofar as they feature in the city films, are narrative devices whose function is to deepen our view of the crisis in masculinity. This helps us understand why the female characters are quite different from their counterparts in the novels from which the films were adapted. The novels portrayed them as weak, both within the family and in society. In the films, they are far more subversive and sardonic, shaming the male protagonist’s masculinity but without offering prototypes for a future, whether feminist or patriarchal. They do not fit the standard model of the heroine or vamp in Indian cinema. Contemporary critics who spilled a great deal of ink on Ray’s deviations from literary originals in the context of his early films say nothing on the question of adaptation when it came to the city trilogy, let alone on the significance of the female characters in them. Ray made no bones about the fact that the city films were about men. In between the early films and Home and the World (1984), he noted that “we had the Calcutta stories which deal mainly with jobless young men or men with jobs.” His focus on men during this period may be understood as symptomatic of his perception of the contemporary moment as a crisis of masculinity. The resolute focus on men, in my opinion, signaled his inability to penetrate the world of contemporary women. As a result, we never explore women’s interiority in these films in the manner of Charulata, The Big City, and Devi. At best, women in the city trilogy are shown as impressionable and uncertain. To the extent that the films focus on women, it is to highlight the predicament of men:

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the male loss of control over normative scripts of family, conjugality, and social order, upon which the “women’s question” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was predicated. Commenting on the character of the sister-in-law, Tutul, in Company Limited, Ray observed, The sister-in-law is in a tragic situation, because she came to Calcutta in order to find out what social success . . . and . . . her elder sister’s life with her executive husband was like. She’s disheartened by what she finds, but on the other hand she is not so sure that she can go back to the revolutionary and marry him. She doesn’t know how seriously involved with him she is. . . . She is in Calcutta because she had this great weakness for her brother-in-law, when she was a little girl in her teens. She hasn’t seen him for six or seven years, and now that maybe he’s such a success, let’s see what he is like, whether he has changed completely . . . So she arrives, and at first everything seems all right. But when the crisis comes . . . he collapses completely. It’s evident that he can only think about his own success, his own career going forward.72

Rejecting the interviewer’s suggestion that “this girl, in her relationship with the revolutionary, really poses a moral and political solution to the problems the film raises,” Ray declares, “she’s uncertain,” and disillusioned with the life she came to see.73 Of Shyamalendu, the male protagonist, however, Ray had more clarity. “He’s part of a bureaucratic and commercial machine, which has no place for one single man. If you want to live in a society, you immediately become part of the pattern, and that drives you into something you may not have been from the beginning. This man clearly has two sides. . . his private feelings and his conscience, but the system forces him to dissemble them and to think only of his security and advancement.”74 There is merit in some critics’ argument that men such as Shyamalendu reveal themselves as full-blown on-screen characters thanks to women such as Tutul.75 It follows from these observations that the city films are about the psychodynamics of the contemporary man. Women function as the means by which male characters see themselves. Kauna (The Middleman) and Sutapa/Tapu (The Adversary) are the earning members in their respective families in both the novels and the films. In her literary rendition, Kauna (Shiuli in the novel) is a demure young girl, quivering with shame as her family’s dire circumstances compel her to prostitution. Tapu in the novel is an emotional and headstrong girl who is forced to drop out of college after their father’s death and find a job so that the two brothers can continue their education. Her boss exploits her good looks until one day, in a defiant fit, she hooks up with a neighborhood wastrel, losing her brother’s affections forever.76

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Kauna and Tapu in the films are a far cry from these literary depictions. But it is difficult to classify them into types. There is no “reproductive futurity” in them as marriage or children are never invoked; nor are they femme fatales of Hollywood film noir who have some scheme that will be revealed by the end of the film. While both women display a kind of brittleness on the surface, there is no way of guessing what goes on in their minds. What we make of them is a function of the ways in which they are projected in the imagination of the men who accompany them on-screen. For example, when Tapu demonstrates her dance moves to her brother on the decrepit, poorly illuminated terrace of their home, we see her in Siddhartha’s imagination as partying, drinking, and smoking with wealthy men. Likewise, we learn very little about the nurse who moonlighted as a prostitute. Siddhartha’s disgust and bewilderment when his friend takes him to her apartment is the film’s focus. Women are figments of his unconscious who appear in his fevered dreams. Similarly, in The Middleman, when it emerges that the prostitute whose labor would help Somnath secure a contract was his friend’s sister, Ray’s camera captures the perturbation produced by that knowledge in the male protagonist. Kauna, the prostitute, remains inscrutable. During the two-minute-long sequence in the taxi, Somnath’s frontal profile occupies most of the frame with the viewer only occasionally catching a glimpse of Kauna’s side profile in the dim illumination of traffic lights. Only twice do we see her full face: when she insists on being called “Juthika,” her name for business purposes. In an otherwise fully realized film such as The Middleman, described by scholars like Ravi Vasudevan as Ray’s “last substantial film,” the presence of women remains formulaic, anecdotal, and at best mysterious. No other character in the film is as empty as Somnath’s erstwhile girlfriend. I concur with Chidananda Dasgupta’s observation that everything in The Middleman is “carefully built up, brick by brick, towards the shattering climax at the end.” “Everything except the episode with Somnath’s girlfriend. . . . Unlike the rest of the film, . . . it is schematic, fitted into the structure because a certain weight was necessary in the direction of his personal affections to balance the preoccupation with career in the rest.”77 Unlike Ghatak’s female protagonists, whose extreme sacrifice and shame were held out in full display and heightened by melodrama, in Ray’s city films women are emblems of “present-tenseness,” without pasts or futures. But Ray’s abdication of the effort to render women and their actions legible should not be seen as failure. It is, I argue, an expression of humility, an acknowledgment that postcolonial women’s histories were not fully legible by the terms established during the anticolonial, nationalist-era resolution of the women’s question. As Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, and others have shown, the refashioning of Indian patriarchal ideology by cultural nationalists enabled women to participate in western education and politics, and to engage in modern housekeeping practices, writing, and even join the work force, but so long

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6.9 Somnath escorting “Juthika” to the client, The Middleman.

as their behavior and comportment did not cross the boundaries of (a reconstituted) tradition. Laboring outside the home, in other words, did not necessarily produce the “freedoms promised to women in modernity.” Rather, as Keya Ganguly notes, “The solicitation to become ‘working women’ is a problem within capitalist social relations rather than a redoubt against them.”78 This is the present inhabited by the women in Ray’s city films.

✳✳✳ In the late 1960s to the 1970s, Satyajit Ray’s status within Indian cinema circles was colossal. Articles often opened with hyperbolic statements such as: “There are two effective ways of making a film in India: the commercial way and the Satyajit way. One is a purely local approach, the other is an international one.”79 Reputation, however, was no guarantee that his films were widely distributed and exhibited in other parts of India. Ray himself remarked that they only played on Sunday mornings in New Delhi theaters as exhibitors refused to show Bengali films at any other time, while in Bombay they showed in small suburban theaters. Only in Bangalore did the “original version” of his films “play for

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five or six weeks at a stretch in a major movie theater.”80 It was his own homegrown Bengali audience that was Ray’s most loyal and regular following. He noted, “In Calcutta, I have an audience . . . that has been built up over the years—a very staunch following. . . . Whatever I direct will play in three cinemas in three different parts of the city for at least six weeks.”81 The loyalty of this audience also made it the most critical of Ray’s works. This loyal Bengali audience complained frequently and the loudest that Ray’s films were apolitical. The critique had been simmering from the days of the Apu trilogy, but really gathered momentum over the 1960s. Mrinal Sen once accused Ray of succumbing to the “star-system” by choosing to cast the Bengali matinee idol, Uttam Kumar, in Nayak (The Hero, 1966) and Chiriyakhana (The Zoo, 1967). “The man who so long has been held in high esteem for revolutionizing Indian film” was viewed “with . . . suspicion,” especially by the “Movement”—a “new wave of young Bengali directors” who aimed to make “good” and “artistic films.”82 As audiences became acquainted with the different international new waves and third cinemas (Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, Glauber Rocha of Brazil, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino from Argentina, Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Humberto Solás from Cuba are frequently named) the din around a so-called political cinema intensified.83 Ray’s “denunciation,” by those of the Bengali film societies he had helped establish, writes Moinak Biswas, “came in the name of committed art.”84 Critics debated the meaning(s) that inhered in the expression “political” as it was conjoined to the cinema. Many agreed that a film did not qualify as political “the very moment an element of protest is registered in its confines,” nor when it served as a “safetyvalve” for forces that, if “channelized properly would have spelt danger for the ruling class.” To the extent that they portrayed a “culture favourable to the ruling class” all films were loosely political.85 Left-leaning critics made it clear that they preferred a cinema of revolutionary politics that “seeks to forge a way out of stagnation,” to “give vent to forces that are . . . suppressed,” and “re-align forces that can unleash productivity in every sphere of society, whether economic, educational, cultural, or political.” “Political cinema,” it was argued in an echo of Solanas and Getino’s 1969 manifesto, “is primarily political and secondarily cinema.”86 That is to say a film “has no intrinsic value.”87 Indian films (and Bengali ones certainly) fell short of being political as they remained “restricted to the upper and middle classes for their basic milieu” with no filmmaker venturing into the lives of the “proletariat.”88 Such views aligned with the dominant left-leaning discourse of the time both within civil society and the academy. Marxist historians and social scientists, many of whom wrote for film society publications, charged that the middle classes, especially intellectuals, had failed to either understand or lead the “people” (peasants, workers, lower castes) toward freedom. The modern Bengali

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intellectual functioned at a remove from the masses and this was a condition that haunted that class from the moment of its birth. Born out of the encounter with colonialism, this was a comprador elite that was compared, unfavorably, to the Russian and later Chinese and Vietnamese intelligentsia for its failure to genuinely engage the masses in a way that would culminate in a “going to the people” movement. As historian Sumit Sarkar put it, Above all, the achievement under Lenin of an organic linkage between a significant section of the socialist intelligentsia and the working class, enabling the breakthrough from spontaneity to consciousness and realizing at least in part his What Is To Be Done? program—all that is obviously absent in our past, and to a considerable extent in our present, too.89

The Bengali intelligentsia was seen, in an autocritical gesture, as a product of bourgeois values imbibed through their Western education but without any “material content or links with production.” Writing in a historicist vein, Sumit Sarkar lamented that “the breakthrough in a sustained way from what Gramsci called the ‘economic-corporative’ to the ‘hegemonic’ level of political action yet remains to be achieved in India.”90 Similar lapses were seen in Ray’s films by radically minded cinephiles. His lack of radicalism was contrasted with other filmmakers’ political commitment, beginning with that of Nemai Ghosh (the maker of Chinnamul, a film about partition refugees), and later inevitably that of Ghatak and Sen. In 1966, Chidananda Dasgupta, observed that “[t]he Calcutta of burning trams, the communal riots, refugees, unemployment, rising prices and food shortages, does not exist in Ray’s films. Although he lives in this city, there is no correspondence between him and the ‘poetry of anguish’ which had dominated for the last ten years.”91 Describing 1969, when Ray completed Days and Nights, Dasgupta wrote, “the adult world in Bengal was up in flames.” The city of Calcutta had turned into a conflagration. Murders were taking place everyday, pipe guns and bombs were common sights and sounds, seething discontent among the youth was manifest in the Naxalite movement which many of the best University students joined. It was necessary to understand, not only this new phenomenon, but the sea-change that had taken place in the new generation, now well past the residual glories of the Bengal Renaissance, and impatient with them anyway.92

Ray had failed in this task. For critics like Dasgupta, he had failed to enter the “post-Tagore world” of postindependence India. Postcolonial Indian cities and villages were different from their colonial era predecessors, thereby rendering “old myths” about them inadequate. At best they provided “a rich

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background to the middle-class mind.” But there was a need to translate the latter’s “values into a tougher outlook and language” in order to be an adequate measure of the times.93 Dasgupta was not alone in thinking that Ray was at his best when addressing “the past evolution of the middle class as reflected in the long period dominated by Tagore. . . . A certain image of a villager, the young man getting to know the world outside, the woman slowly liberated through social evolution.” This progressive, developmental becoming of a class, epitomized in turn-of-the-century Bengali literature, was Ray’s forte.94 These assumptions were shattered in the world of the city films. Ray saw the latter as his response to the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s: “Before I made The Adversary, I’d often been criticized for being non-political.” But it was difficult to remain detached from the political sphere. For “politics has come increasingly to the surface in the last three or four years. You feel it every moment of the day in Calcutta: not just the bombs and the explosions, but meeting people and walking the streets with the posters on the walls.”95 The three films recorded this new reality in ample measure. But recording the present was a different enterprise than proposing solutions to its problems. Ray’s early films were projects in historical understanding. Their tenor was progressive and politically emancipatory. In this, they participated in what I have called the long present that stretched out from the colonial past into the postcolonial present and were bound by themes of modernization and development constitutive of Indian debates on the transition to capitalism. The tumultuous changes that accrued in social and political life over the two decades after independence, however, produced the present as an impasse from which Ray was unable to see a way forward or out. The question of historical transition was under scrutiny, with many arguing that the project of modernity in India was flawed to begin with due to its association with colonialism. While Ray may have agreed with this description, he did not share his contemporaries’ certitude about the conditions of possibility for a passive revolution or other ways of ensuring that postcolonial modernity was a realm of freedom. As far as he was concerned, the present was radically and irrevocably altered: the legacies of the past were subject to rethinking and questioning, but there were, as yet, no scripts for the future. The developmental, historicist project of the early films were not true approximations of the postcolonial present. Ray’s repeated references to the evanescence of politics signal his own sense of the difficulty of proposing radical solutions out of the contemporary deadlock. Interviews from the period abound in skeptical statements such as “I have always felt that in India politics is a very impermanent thing. Political parties break up very quickly, and I don’t believe in the Left as such any more. There are now three communist parties in India, and I don’t really know what that means.”96 His thoroughgoing disaffection from politics was clear:

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I have practically ceased to discuss politics—restricted to reading newspapers. Politicians and the whole game of politics is very dishonest. . . . One loses one’s bearings trying to keep up with their change of faces, of colours. Proliferation of politics—don’t feel the urge to comprehend.

He had reportedly left “today’s generation so far behind” because he found it “difficult to understand them.” “The brain has a limited number of compartments,” he noted, with a hint of sarcasm. “There is none left to accommodate what is happening (in the name of politics).”97 In his masterful study of C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938, 1963), anthropologist David Scott argues that anticolonial pasts and postcolonial futures are best understood through the different registers of romance and tragedy. Like other progressive emancipatory narratives, anticolonialism is often a romantic tale of vindication, overcoming, salvation, and redemption.98 History as embodied in such narratives is imagined as moving triumphantly forward into a horizon of progress and emancipation. But the postcolonial inheritance of colonial modernity is better analyzed, argues Scott, as a predicament whose overriding tenor is that of tragedy. As a narrative mode, the latter is more open to contingency, chance, and paradox. I would add that such a postcolonial stance is also more humble than romantic progressive ideologies, which often project a misplaced confidence in their certainty about the future. To be a “conscript” to such an understanding of the postcolonial present, whose overcoming is not already theorized, requires patience, conviction, and resolve in one’s practice. It also requires a refusal to cast the present in terms that are already familiar, and thus more comforting, even if they sound radical to one’s peers. The city films, the last of which Ray described as the “only bleak film I have made,” dominated as it was with a record of “rampant corruption all around,” were an aesthetic expression of a sober, postcolonial temperament.99 Not “unsympathetic” to young people (or romantic revolutionaries), Ray drew the full force of their criticisms in his effort to be true to himself. Abandoning his historicist impulse, he clung on to his practice as “the expression of creative personality.”100 If that meant striking a discordant note among his peers and fans, Ray did not shy away. In 1972, when Maoist ideologies peaked in Calcutta and other parts of the country, he declared, “I understand and admire Mao’s revolution—which has completely changed China and achieved—at a cost— the eradication of poverty and illiteracy. But I don’t think I could find a place in China because I am still too much of an individual . . . and I don’t believe in the new theories which hold that art must be destroyed and doesn’t need to be permanent. I believe in permanent values.”101 In the aftermath of the Bangladesh liberation war, the heightened refugee problem that came in its wake, widespread unemployment and infrastructural crisis, infighting among various factions of the Left, and increasing authoritarianism within the Congress

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party that would soon preside over India’s first national Emergency, Ray’s proclamations were untimely. Today, once again, we find ourselves inhabiting a present when the clamor of all kinds of pasts—long, deep, immediate—and a surplus of histories confound our sense of who we are and where we may be headed. Our challenge is also to live well and ethically in this moment. Ray’s city films are “untimely meditations” on the postcolonial predicament; they show us that it is political and challenging to get one’s bearings patiently before rushing into action, tempting though the latter might be.102

EPILOGUE Art Cinema and Our Present

The Decline of Art Cinema It has been argued that art cinema abruptly disappeared from the Indian film scene in the mid-1980s, but the writing had been on the wall since the late seventies.1 The first blow to art cinema came with the restructuring of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) at the end of the decade. As already noted, Indian art cinema never received sustained support from the state like in Europe, where post–World War II recovery and competition from Hollywood impelled governments to extend support to their respective film industries. The most consistent period of national funding came during the activist phase of the Film Finance Corporation by way of small loans given to a number of filmmakers. That ended in July 1979. Under L. K. Advani, the minister of information and broadcasting, the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation (IMPEC) and the Directorate of Film Festivals were merged into the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)—now envisioned as “a single integrated body to cover various aspects of cinema.”2 Thereafter, a few state governments in Karnataka, West Bengal, and Kerala continued to support art films, but these efforts were not systematic. The revamped NFDC noted that its main goal was not “to finance movies” but to import “the most up-to-date cameras and other equipment” to modernize the production sector and expand exhibition facilities. A far better use of resources, it was argued, was to deploy them for the “development of cinema

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rather than ‘good cinema.’ If cinema prospered ‘good cinema’ would also prosper.”3 When proponents of art cinema rallied to oppose this move toward integration, they were rebuffed as “pseudo-intellectuals whose films nobody wanted to see.”4 Defending the NFDC’s stance, a group of film producers, directors, and artists observed in a memorandum submitted to the government of India that “the spokesmen of the ‘serious cinema’ . . . appear to be interested only in personal benefit and glory. Having got accustomed to public financing of their films, they have developed a vested interest in the perpetuation of the NFDC as a losing public institution. How can such elements be entrusted with the custodianship of the corporation intended to place the film industry on a sound economic footing?”5 Yet in a complete volte-face of such proclamations against financing films, one of the earliest projects that the NFDC undertook was to support Richard Attenborough’s blockbuster biopic, Gandhi (1982). The government of India’s financial backing of this film, I argue, was the second event of significance in the waning of Indian art cinema. When Indira Gandhi returned for a new (and final) term as the prime minister in 1980, she authorized the Government of India, through the NFDC, to give “$6.5 million toward the $22 million” required for the biopic.6 Never had the Indian state paid such a gigantic sum for a single film. The rest of the film’s budget came from the “UK Goldcrest Company and some American private sources,” while Columbia Pictures distributed the film. Rachel Dwyer situates Gandhi in the context of a “Raj revival” occasioned by the “uncertainty in British society as part of Margaret Thatcher’s social engineering and the height of the Cold War,” as well as in Indira Gandhi’s attempts to salvage her image after the infamous Emergency of 1975–77, which had scarred both the nation and Indian cinema (art, popular, and documentary).7 Financing Gandhi, a global film with an international cast and an epic feel, was an effort to undo some of that damage. Although the film predated the opening up of the Indian economy by almost a decade, it was a portent of things to come. Gandhi’s resounding success in the Academy awards validated the Indian government’s stance toward film funding, especially since the NFDC received a third of the film’s global profits.8 Attenborough’s biopic was also touted as a successful pedagogical experiment with film sponsored by the government of India. A poll conducted during the controversy that erupted around Gandhi revealed that many “well-educated, young people in urban India” knew little about Gandhi other than the fact that he “cleaned his own toilet and was for self-dependence.”9 Indira Gandhi issued directives to all state governments to grant tax exemptions on the film’s shows for weeks on end, and theater owners were instructed to reserve seats for school children who were required to watch it as part of history lessons. The irony that it was a “viewing of Gandhi through Western eyes”—with attention given to American characters whose roles in Gandhi’s actual life pale in comparison with those of many Indians overlooked

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by or barely shown in the film—was ignored in favor of its international “galvanizing effects.”10 Gandhi dovetailed with other changes that were contributing to art cinema’s continuing marginalization through the 1980s. One of these was the boom of India’s televisual and video sectors and the “migration of socially relevant content to television.”11 That process, too, began with Mrs. Gandhi’s separation of television from All India Radio and establishing it as a separate entity called Doordarshan in 1976.12 Around 1987–89, Doordarshan teamed up with NFDC to fund a handful of films for theatrical release—Salaam Bombay (Mira Nair, 1988), Main Zinda Hoon (I am alive, Sudhir Mishra, 1988) and Ek Din Achanak (Suddenly one day, Mrinal Sen, 1989). But its main focus was on funding a considerable number of telefilms—including some by artists associated with art cinema such as Amol Palekar, Basu Chatterjee, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Despite its commitment “to breathe new life to good cinema” in the model of Channel 4 in the UK and RAI in Italy, many of Doordarshan’s films, namely Daasi (A Bonded Woman, B. Narsing Rao, 1988) and Marattam (G. Aravindan, 1988) never left the cans.13 Marie Seton’s lament in 1975 that Indian television authorities did not step up to the plate to promote art cinema was true of Doordarshan into the late 1980s. Seton argued that only when television channels devoted considerable time each week to promoting knowledge of them did art films “become a part of general cultural life” in the UK and Europe, so that “an Iranian film, an Egyptian film, a Bengali film is just as acceptable to a wide public as a Swedish, French, Spanish or German film.”14 Neither happened in India. Even as these changes marginalized art cinema, it was the arrival of globalization from 1991 onward that completely transformed India’s media ecology. Economic liberalization has steamrolled and reconstituted large segments of India’s society and polity. Since then, the distinction between art and popular cinema has ceased to be as resonant as it was during the first four decades of Indian independence, as all aspects of cinema—technology, finance, aesthetics, audience, genre, publicity, and demographics—have undergone profound change.15 While there is a growing body of work that analyzes the changes in the cine-scene during the globalization era, I want to single out for remark the multiplex, which arrived in India in 1997.16 Recent work has shown that the multiplex absorbed cinematic multiplicity and retailed it to a growing Indian middle class. They made available to their audiences a mix of “parallel, regional and art cinema” along with mainstream domestic and foreign films. Multiplexes do not identify with “particular kinds of films” but are rather “a theatre for accessing the ‘latest’ from a wide spread of cinematic fare—mainstream or fringe—in comfortable, colourful and inviting surroundings.”17 They have unarguably birthed a “sophisticated media environment” whose middle-class consumer base exercises “disproportionate

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influence on filmmakers.”18 A well-known critique of art films was their cultural elitism: they proclaimed to be for the people, but the people did not watch them. But the multiplex symbolizes another, more pernicious economic elitism of a new and emergent middle class that is coalescing around globalization and claims of a particular Indian identity.19 With private security guards as gatekeepers, the multiplex signals the unabashed segregation in India’s leisure economy between India’s aspirational and growing middle class and vast sections of the poor. The importance of the multiplex is captured well by Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill when they remark: “While Jawaharlal Nehru . . . saw cinema halls as (literally) a waste of concrete, it has become abundantly clear that the leisure economy has to be understood as much more than an ephemeral activity. For good or ill, the status of the multiplex in India today is a powerful indication of how the infrastructure of consumption has replaced industrial output as the symbolic measure of progress.”20 Congruent with the multiplex and economic globalization has been the rise of the phenomenon Sangita Gopal christens as “new Bollywood,” characterized by “a multiplicity of genres” and “stunningly diverse” output. Unlike classical Hindi cinema, whose ambit was Bombay, this new Bollywood cast a more powerful spell upon the imagination of regional cinemas. Gopal’s study of Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, often regarded as a maker of art films, is a persuasive instantiation of the phenomenon she calls “Bollywood local,” a Bengali cinema in the new Bollywood mold. Ghosh’s ample citations of Satyajit Ray, and art cinema in general, should not mislead us into seeing his films as a continuation of the art film. Rather, the citations must be situated within an aesthetic of opulent mise-en-scène borrowed from new Bollywood filmmakers like Sanjay Leela Bhansali.21 Let me conclude this brief discussion about the disintegration and repackaging of art cinema in the contemporary media environment, a return that lacks its earlier political energies, with two quick examples. “You have to make commercial cinema with the discipline of regional cinema. That’s what Ray used to say. If we can achieve that it’s a giant leap for mankind.”22 This is how Bollywood filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh expressed the advantages of making the Hindi thriller blockbuster Kahaani (The Story, 2012) in Kolkata instead of Mumbai. Ghosh’s remarks were made during a televised adda with two other successful Bollywood (and Bengali) filmmakers—Dibakar Banerjee and Pradeep Sarkar. The time limit on a made-for-television adda transforms the Bengali practice of free flowing, unstructured, long, and informal conversation into a halfhour module.23 So, too, is Ray transformed into a model for low-cost regional productivity in a globalized marketplace, repurposed for neoliberal corporate cost-saving standards, his ethos and work practice used to stand in for time discipline and efficiency—traits that would serve the contemporary filmmaker well in hypercompetitive Bollywood.

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The second example is from 2011, when several Bengali filmmakers and theater personalities—Aparna Sen, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Srijit Mukherji, Sandip Ray, and Gautam Ghose—came together with a call to revive the Calcutta Film Society as a vital part of Kolkata’s hallowed intellectual tradition.24 There was much talk of reviving film seminars and film appreciation courses as part of art cinema’s resuscitation. Art cinema was pitched to the public as an integral part of Bengali heritage, whose memory is nostalgically invoked as that past recedes from living memory. Low-cost filmmaking and issues of heritage and cultural preservation, as illustrated by the two examples above, are seen as art cinema’s lasting legacy in the era of globalization. But is this all that Indian art cinema has to offer? Today, when the rapid and dizzying pace of change has attenuated a sense of continuity with the past, are there things from the history of art cinema—other than nostalgia and heritage— that can speak to our times? I want to suggest that there are ways in which the apprehensions of the postcolonial present in art cinema, situated in the decades of disillusionment with development, are in fact vital to our contemporary present when rampant globalization has made the planet itself a matter of concern in humanistic studies.

Art Cinema and Our Planetary Presents and Futures Following political scientist Lisa Wedeen’s gloss, I use “apprehension” in the word’s threefold sense: arrest/capture; understand/perceive; and express anxiety.25 In this book, I have tried to apprehend the history of art cinema in the sense of learning about it from its scattered archives on film and paper. I have also argued that art films themselves were a mode of historical apprehension in the way they sought to understand the uncertainties of the postcolonial present as a way of inhabiting it. In so doing, they registered senses of the present as a state of apprehension, of ongoing anxiety, fear, and anticipation about the future. Let me dwell on this last aspect briefly in this coda. As a historian, it is my commitment to activate pasts in order to find in them resources and lessons for living in the present. E. H. Carr’s classic statement from the 1961 Trevelyan Lectures reminds us that historical facts “speak only when the historian calls on them: it is [s]he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.”26 Only then can history be a “continuous process of interaction . . . a dialogue between the present and the past.”27 Describing his vocation, the pioneering and controversial French film archivist Henri Langlois is said to have remarked, “We walk backwards, we back our  way through life, we move forwards while always looking backwards.”28 Extrapolating from these statements I ask: did my walk backwards

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into the past of art cinema offer any object lessons that we can hold on to as we muddle our way through our present in which, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenging description, the ceaseless predations of consumerist globalization have thrown us into the new age of the “planetary?”29 Why, in other words, would a dialogue between the histories of the postcolonial present apprehended in the art film and our perception of our own times as an age of extremes be meaningful? Art cinema’s most mature expression occurred in the 1960s as filmmakers struggled to live through widespread disorientation in the wake of their deepening disappointments with postcolonial developments. As a “problem space,” art cinema was an attempt to work through that sense of bewilderment. Today we are living through another age of transitions from the global into the planetary, one in which the optimism of globalization seems misplaced in the face of multiple crises: of refugees and migrants, climate change, pandemics, food and water, and an expanding precariat. Our presents similarly usher in evernew feelings of disorientation. I do not diminish the huge differences between these two historical presents. But as we struggle through our confounding times, art cinema seems vital in two ways. First, conceived at a time when India transitioned from colonial rule to a mass democracy, the art cinema movement was like a rambunctious colloquium in which films, cinephilia, criticism, and activism became grounds for debates about the present and future of Indian democracy. These efforts contrast with today’s media culture when all news (a significant portion of which is fake) is potentially viral and all disagreements quickly morph into intolerant pugilism. Media theorist Wendy Chun writes about the segregationist logic of digital algorithmic network culture as “homophily”: the creation of “segregated clusters of agitated sameness.” The result is that “a banal and dangerous notion of friend becomes a synonym for neighbor: segregation becomes naturalized and hatred love. How do you show that you love the same? By fleeing when others show up. Hatred attracts and repels at the same time, creating angry clusters that need to hate.”30 In such a situation there is something to be salvaged from the culture of dissent discussed in this book. Literary scholar Debjani Ganguly’s exploration of the idea of “radical middle” is helpful here. Ganguly proposes the “radical middle” as a critical inheritance from the age of analog to combat the “binary excesses” of the digital era. Even if, at first glance, “the collocation of radical with middle is paradoxical,” she writes, given the conservative, almost negative connotations of middlebrow, middle-class, middleman, middle age and so forth, there are intimations of patience, slowness, proportionality, and deliberation in the idea of the “analogue” that imbues the middle with a radical charge.31 Art cinema is an instantiation of such a radical middle. It is a postcolonial assemblage, a heterogeneous and argumentative aggregation that

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keeps generating new meanings in its own time and in ours as new films, archives, and memories of film-related works and personages emerge.32 Second, the filmmakers and films discussed in these pages stand out for their resolute acceptance of the postcolonial present, but not before troubling and rendering scandalous the foundational assumptions undergirding that present. Especially significant in this regard is their early engagement with and their struggle to apprehend a period in the history of the nation when ideas of “development” and “progress” could no longer act as orienting principles. In this, art films offer us resources with which to inhabit our own disorienting times— wracked by a global pandemic, authoritarian politics, and the tremendous might of neoliberal states challenging the conditions of being citizens and humans the world over. Environmental problems have forced us to question the viability of neoliberal capitalist globalization and the future it once promised. We can relate to developmental narratives today only through contemplation of their contradictions and ironies. For we are more aware than ever before that “human adventures” with coal, gas, and energy—the romance of development— have produced disorienting times in social and world history.33 The word, Anthropocene, the proposed name for a geological epoch produced by human beings acting on the planet with the force of natural geological agents, describes a world “so disorienting that every discipline, every interest group offers an alternative term, insisting on this or that variable, in order to cope with the maelstrom.”34 This is the present that scholars characterize as the age of “planetarity.” Of course, like any word becoming popular in the humanities, the word “planet” and the neologism “planetarity” are polysemic. They are taking on many meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other. Some mean by planet the object of study that Earth System Science creates for itself, others invoke it to mean different ideas of cosmology and the universe that different groups of humans have entertained in multiple places and distant times. Still others signal with the expression “planet” their discomfiture and resistance to the word “globe.” While these debates are enriching for the humanities, it is clear that the exigencies of our times are forcing us to learn to bring together into our thinking phenomena that seemed unrelated, such as the globe of globalization with the globe of global warming, materialist critiques of subalternity and postcoloniality with new materialist theories of “hyper-objects” and “vibrant matter,” and the human history of the globe with the planetary history of biological life.35 The epochal time of the Anthropocene is now being seen as ordered by a “series of temporal scales: biographical, nomological, biological, zoological, geological, and cosmological.”36 Of course, the art cinema I have discussed here was produced in times that were very different from the times we are passing through. But those times and ours have one striking commonality:

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they are both disorienting. The promise of capitalist prosperity has worn thin for us. The filmmakers, critics, and film society activists all felt disillusioned with the promise of national development. They worked out their own ways of negotiating such times. The art films leave us with road maps of the time they inhabited, where the realm of experience could no longer be a guide to the horizon of future expectations. We cannot, of course, live out their experiences— the past is indeed past. But in retrospect, we can recognize in their work the pioneering labor of a certain kind that we also need today: the creation of historical sensibilities adequate to the challenges of disorienting times. It is in this sense that Indian art cinema constitutes for us an ongoing repertoire of resources.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

his book would have been impossible to write without the support of many people. I want to acknowledge the generous support of the Division of the Humanities, deans Anne Robertson and Martha Roth, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. This book’s engagement with film, history, and India reflects my interdisciplinary intellectual life at the University of Chicago spanning South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Center for the Study in Gender and Sexuality, the University of Chicago Center in New Delhi, and the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. For their collegiality, I am grateful to Muzaffar Alam, E. Annamalai, Lauren Berlant, Mandira Bhaduri, Irving Birkner, the late Robert Bird, Dominique Bluher, Whitney Cox, Tracy Davis, Thibaut d’Hubert, Wendy Doniger, Sascha Ebeling, Allyson Field, Jeanne Fitzsimmons, Julia Gibbs, Jason Grunebaum, Judy Hoffman, Patrick Jagoda, Rashmi Joshi, Fredrik Jonsson, Kara Keeling, James Lastra, Aditi Modi, Richard Neer, Andrew Ollett, Emily Osborn, Jennifer Pitts, David Rodowick, Jacqueline Stewart, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Ulrike Stark, Gary Tubb, Traci Verleyen Hope, and Tyler Williams. Several years ago, Tom Gunning and the late Miriam Hansen generously let me sit in on some of their classes. That was my first encounter with academic cinema studies. I have continued to learn from Tom over many dinners, coffees, Franke Institute cinematheques, and palavers. James Chandler brought me into the department of Cinema and Media Studies, a move that transformed my life. He is, for me, a model of interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. I am deeply grateful

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for the care of four extraordinary physicians at the University of Chicago hospitals—Kamala Cotts, Nora Jaskowiak, Yasmin Hasan, and Rita Nanda. Surya Bandyopdhyay, Basu Chatterjee, Shuvendu Dasgupta, Gopal Dutia, Amrit Gangar, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli, P. K. Nair, H. N. Narahari Rao, and C. S. Venkiteswaran kindly gave me access to film society journals, photographs, and program notes. Conversations with them offered a glimpse into the world of activism around art cinema. To them and to Prakash Magdum, the director of the National Film Archives of India, and his team Mrs. Urmila Joshi, Mrs. Veena Kshirsagar, Mrs. Arti Karkhanis, and Mr. Kiran Diwar, and to Gautam Chattopadhyay at the Nandan Archives, my heartfelt gratitude. It was a joy collaborating with Moinak Biswas and Ashish Rajadhyaksha on the new cinemas conference in 2015, and the digitization project for indiancine.ma leading up to it. Thank you Ashish and Moinak-da for never tiring of my queries and your continuing mentorship. I have learned so much from you both during our addas and meals in Kolkata, Pune, Delhi, and Chicago. I want to thank Maharghya Chakraborty, Jenson Joseph, and Utsab Sen for digitizing and annotating the works of Mrinal Sen, Jahnu Barua, and John Abraham as part of our new cinemas project. Ananda Mukherjee’s help with finding books, film society journals, and other ephemera has been vital. I am grateful to Pinaki De for his generous insights into Ray’s graphics. Sandip Ray granted permission to use some images from the Ray Archives, entertained countless frantic phone calls from me, and welcomed me to his apartment, still filled with books, papers, and living memories of his father Satyajit. Dan Morgan has read most of this book in draft, multiple times. He has been immeasurably generous in giving me references, talking things through, and posing challenging questions. My intellectual debts to him and several colleagues, in Chicago and elsewhere, who have read and commented on parts of this work are profound. Thank you Prathama Banerjee, Bill Brown, Debjani Ganguly, Paola Iovene, Usha Iyer, William Mazzarella, Durba Mitra, Sarah Nooter, Margrit Pernau, Ranu Roychoudhuri, Salomé Skvirsky, Nazmul Sultan, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Lisa Wedeen, and Jennifer Wild. Your interventions have sharpened my argument, widened the scope of my readings, and helped me to engage in a dialogue across disciplines. Ranjani Mazumdar and Priya Jaikumar’s warmth and intellectual generosity sustained me just when my energy was flagging at some points in this project. Marathon phone conversations with Sangita Gopal are life-giving. They generated much food for thought and many thoughts about food. I have presented parts of this work to different audiences at Jadavpur University; University of Pennsylvania; University of Texas, Austin; Stanford University; Cambridge University; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Oberlin College; Bard Museum; Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotions, Berlin; University of Oregon; NYU Abu Dhabi; INALCO, Paris; University

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of Chicago; Hebrew University; and at the Madison, Asian Studies, and Society for Cinema and Media Studies conferences. In particular, I want to thank Sumit Guha, Indrani Chatterjee, Projit Mukharji, Toral Gajarawala, Jisha Menon, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Anuradha Needham, Bhaskar Sarkar, Neepa Majumdar, Rielle Navitski, Jérémie Codron, Philippe Benoit, Madhuja Mukherjee, and Shruti Kapila for their comments. It remains for me to say only that any surviving errors and infelicities are my own. I wish I could have shared this book with Miriam Hansen, Christopher Bayly, Alison Winter, and Don Willard, four extraordinary individuals I will always miss. My students (and former students) at the University of Chicago have helped me realize my vocation as an educator. Heartfelt thanks to Ranu Roychoudhuri, Smita Gandotra, Joya John, Arvind Elangovan, Arnab Dey, Ahona Panda, Supurna Dasgupta, Taimur Reza, Sanjukta Poddar, Thomas Newbold, Andrew Halladay, Jenisha Borah, Zoya Sameen, Meredith McGuire, Abhishek Bhattacharya, Sharvari Sastry, Ritika Kaushik, Titas de Sarkar, and Shubham Shivang. Supurna Dasgupta, Ahona Panda, Ranu Roychoudhuri, Rajarshi Ghose, and Tarika Khattar have also provided valuable research assistance at different points in this project. Philip Leventhal has been a marvelous editor. His speedy feedback and patience, especially during the challenging time of Covid-19, made the publication process enjoyable. It was reassuring to know that I could always reach out to him and to Monique Briones. I am grateful for the creative and professional assistance of Milenda Lee, Partha Chakrabartty, and Susan Pensak in the preparation of the book. I received extraordinarily engaged and constructive feedback from the two anonymous readers of this manuscript. This is a far stronger book for their input. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (Spring 2016). An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (May 2012), copyright © 2011, Cambridge University Press; reprinted with permission. I am grateful to those journals for the right to reprint. Indian city names (Pune, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai) have changed in recent decades. I used the versions cited in my sources. I want to express my gratitude to friends: Bidisha Banerjee, Annie Cohen Solal, Daisy Delogu, Ally Field, Paola Iovene, Kara Keeling, Dan Morgan, Projit and Manjita Mukharji, Sarah Nooter, Don Reneau, and Salomé Skvirsky. Jennifer Cole, Ulrike Stark, Jennifer Wild, and Lisa Wedeen—four remarkable women—are vital to my everyday. Hyde Park would be difficult to imagine without Barbara Willard, Jim and Elizabeth Chandler, Diana Young and Bill Brown, Mohan and Lalita Gundeti, Kunal Sen and Nisha Ruparel-Sen, Seenu and Jaya Hariprasad, Muzaffar and Rizwana Alam, and the indomitable Neeraj Jolly. Even though Gerry Siarny has recently chosen Berkeley over Hyde Park,

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he has not deserted me. I thank him for his steadfast friendship, copyediting, and research assistance of many years, and look forward to many more. Although far away, my stepson Arko Chakrabarty has enriched my life. Kolkata is my first love. But the city would not be the same without my two dearest friends, Sujata Bose and Semanti Ghosh. I thank Shyamapada Roy, Jyotsna Sarkar, Naran Sarkar, Sudeshna Mondal, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Debiprakash Basu, Tandra Basu, Rita Chattopadhyay, Tridibesh Bandyopadhyay, Disha Shampan Ghatak, and Umakanta Roy for their warmth and care. My courageous sister-in-law, Rimi Chakrabarty, gave me much affection. I treasure her memory. I have learned much from my other sister-inlaw, Sharmistha Gooptu, whose research on Bengali films has been so helpful to my own explorations of the subject. And I marvel at how she has reinvented herself as a novelist. I miss my grandmother Sumita Mondal and uncle Asim Mondal. My last round of thanks is to some very special people. My mother, Roopa Majumdar, is the most beautiful human being I know. She and my father, the late Dr. Prodosh Majumdar, have given my brother and me our values and principles. They have taught us to weather life’s challenges. My heart bursts with pride when I think of my brother, Boria Majumdar. Boria, you are my little brother, but I lean on you all the time. Your spirit, courage, optimism, hard work, and love keep me centered. My niece, Aisha Gooptu Majumdar—my beloved, adorable, Teeny—is the apple of my eye. Seeing your face and playing with you every morning energizes me. Your innocence makes me never want to stop trying to make the world better. Dipesh Chakrabarty, my husband, is the love of my life and my emotional anchor. His humanity and scholarship have opened up new and exciting intellectual and musical worlds for me. Dipeshda, it is exhilarating to have you by my side every day. Thank you for cherishing me in sickness and in health. This book is for you.

NOTES

Introduction 1. There is a rich, varied, and long history of the question of film’s status as an art going back to the 1920s and 1930s. It is manifest in the German Kino-Debatte, the French experiments with film d’art, and in the Soviet context in the writings of Sergei Eisenstein and others. For a succinct account and intervention into the debate on aesthetics, see Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Anton Kaes, “The Debate About Cinema: Charting a Controversy (1909–1929),” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 7–33. There is a small but robust literature that analyzes debates on art cinema in the era of globalization. See James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, eds., Global Art Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2. Explaining why he chose “regime” over “form (of historicity),” François Hartog explains, “The term ‘regime’ encompasses the senses of dietary regime (regimen in Latin, diatita in Greek), of political regime (politeia), of the regime of the winds, and in French the term extends to an engine’s speed (le regime d’un moteur), in revs per minute. What these relatively disparate domains have in common is the idea of degrees, of more or less, of mixtures and composites, and an always provisional or unsteady equilibrium.” A “regime of historicity” furthermore is not a “factual given” but is “constructed by the historian.” Its value is in its “heuristic potential.” François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xv–xvi. 3. Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 17.

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4. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 5. The title Forgotten Futures is among other things an acknowledgment of my debt to the new film history pioneered by Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Yuri Tsivian, and others. Gunning and Hansen both discuss the theme of forgotten film future(s) as they argue against linear, progressive histories of cinema. See Tom Gunning, “Animated Pictures, Tales of Cinema’s Forgotten Future,” Michigan Quarterly Review 34, no. 4 (1995): 465–85; Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 306–43. My invocation of forgotten futures is not just about the history of cinema but about the ways in which cinema informs future imaginations of the postcolonial nation. 6. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. 7. Scott, Conscripts, 1–2. 8. Scott, Conscripts, 4. 9. For accounts of early cinema in India, see Debashree Mukherjee, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015). 10. “Department: Film Studies,” Jadavpur University, accessed on Feb 1, 2020, http://www .jaduniv.edu.in/view_department.php?deptid=68. 11. For example, Ravi Vasudevan served as the associate editor of Filmikon, the journal published by Celluloid, the film society of the University of Delhi. Ashish Rajadhyaksha was active with Screen Unit Mumbai, which published his book on Ritwik Ghatak. 12. The distinction between the “cloistered” and “public” life of disciplines was made by Dipesh Chakrabarty to distinguish between the life that a discipline (his focus was on history) has through “journals, reviews, specialized conferences, university departments, professional associations, and so on. It is a life fostered by and confined to academic institutions.” Public life refers to the way that “discussions in the public domain . . . shape the fundamental categories and practices of the discipline’s . . . academic life.” The two lives of the discipline of history, he argues, interact with and mold one another. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6–7. Also see Bain Attwood, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Claudio Lomnitz, eds. “The Public Life of History,” special issue, Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008). 13. Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22, no. 1 (1981): 11–39. Neale argued that art cinema was the creative expression, mainly during the post–World War II period, of specific national film industrial institutions in the three European countries—Italy, Germany, and France. For critiques of Neale, see Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Andrew Higgins, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 37–46; Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the

Introduction

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). The national paradigm has also been called into question by scholars who have focused especially on film exhibition and reception. See Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Thomas Elsaesser, “ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 57–81; Douglas Gomery, “Ethnic Theaters and Art Cinemas,” in Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentations in the United States (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 180–95; Jim Lane, “Critical and Cultural Reception of the European Art Film in 1950s America: A Case Study of the Brattle Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts),” Film History 24 (1994): 49–64. For postcolonial Egypt, see Kay Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestoes: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Ashis Nandy, “Popular Cinema and the Slum’s Eye View of Indian Politics,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Ashis Nandy (New York: Zed, 1998), 1–19. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xviii. Michel de Certeau cited in Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xviii. Partha Chatterjee, I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 100. M. Madhava Prasad cited in Chatterjee, I Am the People, 100. Also see M. Madhava Prasad, Cine Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2014). Prasad discusses the phenomenon of star-turned-politicians M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), N. T. Rama Rao (NTR), and Rajkumar in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka respectively, and includes an appendix on J. Jayalalitha, the female star/chief minister of Tamil Nadu. For a different account of the star politician, see Constantine Nakassis, “Rajini’s Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence,” Signs and Society 5, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 201–42. Chatterjee, I Am the People, 99. Chatterjee, I Am the People, 99. This understanding of popular sovereignty draws on Eric Santner’s discussion of the people in The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), xi–xii. Nazmul S. Sultan, “Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 81–94. We see evidence of such ties both within films that invoke global and local movements, and in film society publications. Ritwik Ghatak’s first film, Nagarik (The Citizen, 1952), used the tune of the Internationale. Numerous films invoked struggles against the Vietnam war, the war in Biafra, the Cuban revolution, and the Naxalite movement within their narratives (Calcutta 71, The Adversary) as well as in the innumerable articles (original pieces, reprints, and translations) in film society journals in support of filmmakers and cine groups that faced state repression. Examples are numerous. I cite a few here. Cine News, a slim anthology of snippets published by the Cine Club of Calcutta through the 1970s, contains news about Glauber Rocha (Brazil), Basuki Effendy (Indonesia), and Jorge Sanjinés (Bolivia): Cine News Anthology (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1981), 3–9, 26–27. See also Edith Laurie, “The New York Filmmakers’ Fight for Independence,” Indian Film Culture 3 (July–Sep. 1963): 21–27; Jean Rouch, “The Awakening of African Cinema,” Indian Film Culture 1 (April–June  1962): 7–11;

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

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Shuvendu Dasgupta, “Camera jokhon Rifle,” an essay on Joris Ivens first published in 1973 in the Bengali journal Antarjatik Angik, reprinted in Shuvendu Dasgupta, Chalacitra: Anya Prabandha (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1991), 38–40; Sumit Chowdhury, “Memories of Underdevelopment,” Filmikon 1, no. 1 (Dec. 1976): 19–21. Adoor Gopalakrishnan, “Foreword,” in V. K. Cherian, India’s Film Society Movement: The Journey and Impact (New Delhi: Sage, 2017), ix. Gopalakrishnan, “Foreword,” ix. Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Kulathoor Bhaskaran Nair, A Scheme for Setting Up of Art Theatres in Kerala (Trivandrum: Chitralekha Cooperative, April 7, 1973). “Building for Chitralekha,” Chitralekha (1974): 24–28. Ghatak’s first film, Nagarik (The Citizen) was completed in 1952 but only released posthumously, in 1977. Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) released on August 26, 1955, and Sen’s Raat Bhore (The Dawn) on October 21, 1955. Chapter 2 analyzes their role in the Indian new wave. Later Indian filmmakers, notably Aparna Sen, Rituparno Ghosh, and Sujoy Ghosh, acknowledge the impact of Ray, Ghatak, and Sen on their film practice. See Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi, and Rohit Dasgupta, “The World of Rituparno Ghosh: Texts, Contexts, and Transgressions,” South Asian History and Culture 6, no. 2 (2015): 223–37; Sangita Gopal, Conjugations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 155–85. Counting feature films, shorts, and documentaries, there are 36 by Ray, 13 by Ghatak (not including his incomplete ventures), and 46 by Sen. Ray wrote historical essays on Hollywood and Indian films, on individual filmmakers (John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni to name a few) and films, film festivals, book reviews, silent cinema (American, European, and Indian), as well as essays about his own filmmaking. See Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976); Speaking of Films (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005), originally published in Bengali as Bishay Chalachitra (Calcutta: Ananda, 1985); and Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema, ed. Sandip Ray (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2011). There are, in addition, a number of autobiographical writings such as Jokhon Choto Chilam. Mrinal Sen’s books include Charlie Chaplin (in Bengali) (Calcutta: New Age, 1953). Ray did the cover design of this book. Sen’s other books include Views on Cinema (Calcutta: Ishan, 1977). Views was dedicated to Ritwik Ghatak. Also see Mrinal Sen, Montage (Kolkata: Seagull, 2002); Cinema, Adhunikata (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Pratikshana, 1992); the autobiographical work Always Being Born (Kolkata: Stellar, 2004) that was translated into Bengali as Tritiya Bhuvan (Kolkata: Ananda, 2011). Sen’s published scripts with extended remarks by him include Amar Bhuvan (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2004); Chitranatya (including Ekdin Pratidin, Kharij, and Mahaprithibi) (Kolkata: Punascha, 2004); The Absence Trilogy (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn, The Case Is Closed, Suddenly One Day) (Calcutta: Seagull, 1999); Antareen (Calcutta: Bitarka, 1997); In Search of Famine (Calcutta: Seagull, 1985), also published in Bengali as Akaler Sandhane (Calcutta: Bibhab, 1982); and The Ruins (Khandahar) (Calcutta: Seagull, 1984). An anthology of Ghatak’s writings were published in Bengali as Chalachitra, Manush ebong aro Kichu (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2005) and in English as Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000). Ray served in editorial roles for the journals published by the Calcutta Film Society and the Federation for Film Societies in India. All three wrote and interviewed extensively for film society journals. Examples of recent collections in Bengali include Ritwik Ghatak, Kathabarta Sangraha, ed. Partha Mukhopadhyay (Kolkata: Pratibhaash, 2019); and Agranthita Satyajit, Chitrabhaash Special Number, vols. 48–49 (2013–14). I am drawing here on Michel de Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” in The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 63.

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33. Ritwik Ghatak, “What Ails Indian Filmmaking,” in Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000), 16–20; Mrinal Sen, “What Is a Good Film?,” in Views on Cinema (Calcutta: Ishan, 1977), 48–50; Satyajit Ray, “What Is Wrong with Indian Films?,” in Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976), 19–24. 34. Ray’s screenplays were usually published in the journal Ekkhon founded by Nirmalya Acharya and the actor, Soumitra Chatterjee. Film Society publications such as Chitrabhaash published special issues on films by these three directors, including their scripts. 35. Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 19. 36. Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press, 132. 37. Uday Mehta cited in Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press, 138. 38. Lutz Koepnick, The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 39. Ghatak, “An Attitude to Life and an Attitude to Art,” in Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000), 9–15. 40. Government of West Bengal, Nandan, West Bengal Film Centre 1985 (Calcutta: Director of Information, Govt. of West Bengal, 1985). Nandan, also described as the “Calcutta Film Centre” and as “India’s First Art Film Complex” in this booklet, was officially inaugurated on September  2, 1985. See statement by Jyoti Basu, Chief Minister of West Bengal, August 22, 1985, on p. i. 41. Film society screenings occurred in colleges, private homes, and movie theaters in the mornings while many Indian art films did not get commercial releases. See chapter 3 for more details. On “sure seaters,” as art house theaters were called in the U.S., see Wilinsky, Sure Seaters, 2. 42. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 43. “A Soft Self-Portrait,” Vijayawada Film Society Souvenir, Tenth Anniversary Celebrations (1983), 2. 44. Filmikon: A Journal of the Celluloid Film Society 1, no. 1 (Dec 1976): 3. See image 0.1 above. 45. Report of the Film Inquiry Committee (New Delhi: Government of India, 1951), 44–45. 46. Ray, Our Films Their Films, 12. 47. Ray, Our Films Their Films, 14–15. 48. Aimé Césaire, “Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems by Aimé Césaire,” cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Crises of Civilization (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 49. 49. Aamir Mufti, Forget English! (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 190–91. 50. Mufti, Forget English!, 40. 51. Ghatak cited in Shuvendu Dasgupta, “Ritwik samparke Ritwik” (Ritwik on Ritwik), in Chalacitra Anya Prabandha (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1991), 16. 52. Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 17. 53. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History cited in Ranajit Guha, History at the Limits of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 4. 54. Guha, History at the Limits, 94. 55. Guha introduces the idea of “historicality” to posit an alternative to the Hegelian understanding. Historicality is beholden to literature as a means of understanding the world. 56. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e),

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57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

Introduction

Columbia University, 2006), 284–85. He writes, “We can imagine similar problems which, at different moments, in different circumstances, and under different conditions, send shock waves through various fields: painting, music, philosophy, literature, and cinema. The tremors are the same, but the fields are different.” He cautions that “cinematic criticism is at its worst when it limits itself to cinema as though it were a ghetto.” Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More Than Two Decades Later,” interview, Columbia Law School, accessed on Feb 2, 2020, https://www.law.columbia.edu/pt-br /news/2017/06/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Satyajit Ray, Ray’s Films, and the Ray-Movie,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (Jan 1993): 12. Also see Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 201–60. Ravi Vasudevan, “Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism in Indian Cinema: The Double-take of Modernism in Ray,” in Apu and After, ed. Moinak Biswas (Kolkata: Seagull, 2006), 89. Also see Sourin Bhattacharya, “Develop-mentalist Turn: Recovering Ray’s Panchali,” and Moinak Biswas, “Early Films: The Novel and Other Horizons,” in the same volume, 19–79; Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Chandak Sengoopta, “The Fruits of Independence: Satyajit Ray, Indian Nationhood, and the Specter of Empire,” South Asian History and Culture 2, no.  3 (July  2011): 374–96; Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (New Delhi: Roli, 2010), 213–53. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2018), 161. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 110. Rajadhyaksha, “Satyajit Ray, Ray’s Films, and the Ray-Movie,” 15; Sumit Chowdhury, “Jana Aranya,” Filmikon 1, no. 1 (Dec 1976): 33. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, in Satyajit Ray Interviews, ed. Bert Cardullo (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), 58. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony; Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Provincializing Europe; Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Prathama Banerjee, Politics of Time: “Primitives” and History Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37–44. Ghatak was described as a third cinema filmmaker by Paul Willemen, Geeta Kapur, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. See essays by Willemen, Rajadhyaksha, and Kapur in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 1–29,

1. Art Cinema 241

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

170–78, 179–94. For a critique of writings on third cinema that globalize the category, often at the expense of the Latin American films and manifestos, especially Solanas and Getino’s Toward a Third Cinema, see Jonathan Buchsbaum, “A Closer Look at Third Cinema,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 21, no. 2 (2001): 153– 66. For a critical account of the differences and histories of the third cinema manifestoes, see Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI and Channel Four, 1983), 2–8. It is well-known that the film, made some time in the mid-sixties, was shown in sections and clandestinely. “It was constructed in such a way that it could be stopped in the projector to allow for discussion.” Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, 3. While the term “Third Cinema” came into being with Solanas and Getino, it has since then come to refer to a number of Latin American film manifestos and related movements, namely “An Aesthetic of Hunger” (Glauber Rocha, Brazil), “Towards a Third Cinema” (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Argentina), “For an Imperfect Cinema” (Julio García Espinosa, Cuba), “Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema” (Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia). See Anthony Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Rethinking Third Cinema (London: Routledge, 2003). Michael Chanan, “The Changing Geography of Third Cinema,” Screen 38, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 374. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 178. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). “Since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of the political, as distinguished from metaphysical thought.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. The churning of the oceans story is in Wendy Doniger, “Hinduism,” in The Norton Anthology of World Religions, vol. 1 (New York: Norton), 158–59. In India, Sen was regarded as the most “political” of the three filmmakers, and Ray the least. I refer to these comparisons in the chapters of part 2. In addition, see, Jacob Levich, “Subcontinental Divide: The Undiscovered Art of Ritwik Ghatak,” Film Comment 33, no. 2 (March–April 1997): 30–35; Swagato Chakravorty, “Out of the Waiting Room of History: Ritwik Ghatak’s Cinema of Partition,” Los Angeles Review of Books (February 22, 2020), accessed on February 23, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article /out-of-the-waiting-room-of-history-ritwik-ghataks-cinema-of-partition/.

1. Art Cinema 1. Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. 2. Often described as “good” or “meaningful” cinema, these descriptions mostly tell us what art cinema is not. As an example, see the symposium proceedings in “Meaningful Cinema: Alternative Channels,” Indian Film Culture 10 (1981): 18–35. 3. Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public, 75. 4. Geeta Kapur as discussed in Moinak Biswas, “Early Films: The Novel and Other Horizons,” in Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema, ed. Moinak Biswas (Calcutta:

242 1. Art Cinema

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

Seagull, 2006), 38. Kapur regarded Ray as a liberal, modernist filmmaker whose early works reflected the modernization program of the Nehruvian state. Geeta Kapur, “Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (January 1993): 17–49. Also see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Satyajit Ray, Ray’s Films, and the Ray-Movie,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (January 1993): 7–16. Examples of such desire are numerous. See Gertrud Koch, “Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 167–77. The question of mass production and art goes back to Frankfurt school theorists, especially Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. For one of the most sustained and critical accounts of these theorists’ relationship to film, see Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). There are many examples from Russia. See Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich, “The Eighth Art: On Expressionism, America, and Of Course Chaplin,” in S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings, 1922–1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 29. In France, the issue of cinema’s “purity” and specificity over the other arts was controversially articulated by Alexander Astruc and Francois Truffaut. See Alexander Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo”; Francois Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema”; and Andre Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” in The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 31–38, 39–64, 65–90. An object of desire, Lauren Berlant argues in a different context, functions as a “cluster of promises” in which “we encounter what’s incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments.” Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 23. Miriam Hansen’s discussion of the Tower of Babel in the context of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance offers a salutary example of a desire for universality that is a recurrent theme in cinematic discourse. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Early American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 184–89. Even before the constitution was formally adopted and India was declared a republic, a resolution was issued on August 29, 1949 to form a Film Enquiry Committee through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of the new Indian government. See Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, 1951 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1951); hereafter cited in text as R. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 25–26 (December 1993): 56. Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama,” 56. Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama,” 56. Ravi Vasudevan’s important essay, “Shifting Code, Dissolving Identities,” points us to a slightly different origin of the category “art cinema.” He claims that a “high culture for cinema existed as a series of propositions given expression only in the very restricted confines of Bengali art cinema” during the 1940s and 1950s. Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public, 74. William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Also see Nitin Govil, Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

1. Art Cinema 243 14. It should be noted, however, that there were some differences of opinion between the Report and personnel from the film industries, particularly producers. This was probably due to the fact that the industries did not feel adequately represented on the committee, which had only two members, B. N. Sircar and V. Shantaram, with any direct links to cinema. Nonetheless, the committee tried to canvas opinions of 3,630 film-related persons who they noted were far more responsive than people interviewed from other walks of life. For more details, see Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, 1951 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1951), 4–6 and section 4, “The Film and the Public,” 39–62. 15. Patil quoted in “Social and Personal,” Journal of the Film Industry (November 1955): 4. Jaikumar’s Cinema at the End of Empire (2006) analyzes the complex and unequal links between British and Indian film industries in the late imperial years. 16. The Commonwealth of India League, often referred to as the India League, was formed in 1922 out of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League, which had in turn been formed in 1916. Comprising British, Indian, and Ceylonese members, and working closely with the Labor Party, the Communist Party, women’s groups, and the Fabian society, the League campaigned for full Indian independence from British rule from the 1930s onward. 17. For more details on S. K. Patil’s student days, see S. K. Patil, My Years with Congress (Bombay: Parchure Prakashan Mandir, 1991), 8–10. Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar is best known for his eight-volume biography of M. K. Gandhi. He studied with Sergei Eisenstein and later became a close colleague of the important documentary filmmaker P. V. Pathy. For details on Tendulkar’s relationship to Pathy, see Jag Mohan, Dr. P. V. Pathy: Documentary Filmmaker, 1906–1961 (Poona: National Film Archive of India, 1972), 36–37. 18. See Ramesh Kumar, “National Film Archives: Policies, Practices, and Histories” (PhD diss., New York University, 2016), especially chapter 2. 19. Quoted in John Ellis, “Art, Culture and Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies,” Screen 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 19–20; hereafter cited in text as ACQ. 20. For accounts of Bazin’s reception and influence in different parts of the world (Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, China, and Japan), see essays by John MacKay, Alice Lovejoy, Ismail Xavier, Cecile Lagesse, Kan Nozaki, and Ryan Cook in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21. For an account of his reception in British film circles from the 1950s to the early 1970s, see Charles Barr, “Rethinking Film History: Bazin’s Impact in England,” Paragraph 36, no. 1 (March 2013): 133–52. 22. Barr, “Rethinking Film History.” Certainly, early Indian writers in film societies never invoked Bazin by name, even though many of them expressed sharply polarized views on French New Wave cinema whose makers were deeply influenced by Bazin’s works. 23. Dudley Andrew, Andre Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 109. 24. David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 25. See David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes. For discussions of art cinema as a different mode of exhibition, film practice, and aesthetics in an earlier period in some of these countries, see Tom Gunning, “Ontmoetingen in Verduisterde Ruimten: Der alternatieve programmering van de Nederlandsche Filmliga,” in Céline Linssen, Hans Schoots, and Tom Gunning, eds., Het Gaat om de Film!: Eeen nieuwe geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga 1927–1933 [Encounters in darkened rooms: The alternative film

244 1. Art Cinema

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

programming of the Dutch Filmliga] (Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen, 1999); David Bordwell, “Art Cinema as a Mode of Practice,” Film Criticism 4 (Fall 1979): 56–64. Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22, no. 1 (1981): 34. See Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Andrew Higgins, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 37–46; Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). The national paradigm has also been called into question by scholars who have focused especially on film exhibition and reception. See Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Douglas Gomery, “Ethnic Theaters and Art Cinemas,” in Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentations in the United States (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 180–95; Jim Lane, “Critical and Cultural Reception of the European Art Film in 1950s America: A Case Study of the Brattle Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts),” Film History 24 (1994): 49–64. There is also James Tweedie’s important work, mentioned earlier, that questions Euro-American geographical boundedness of art cinema by proposing to study twentieth-century new waves—the French, Taiwanese, and Chinese in particular—within a “global” frame. James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). These were the Lahore school (A. R. Kardar, Shaukat Hussein Rizvi, Nurjehan, Ghulam Haider, and the Chopra brothers); the Madras school (Vasan’s Gemini Studio), and the Bengal school (Nitin Bose, Bimal Roy). Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 52. The Films Division, headquartered in Bombay, was formed in 1948 out of a merger of the colonial-era Information Films of India and the Indian News Parade. It was a dynamic unit where a number of important documentary and feature filmmakers had an early stint in their careers. The above quotation appears in a letter that Ghatak wrote to Sashadhar Mukherjee and Ashok Kumar in April 1956 when he was working in the Filmistan studio. Surama Ghatak, Ritwik (Asha Prakashani, 1977, republished Calcutta: Anustup, 1995), 57. “Encroachment,” BMPA Journal 2, no. 3, new series (September 1955): 1. He wrote, “people who wanted their rigid views to be forced on others did not realize and refused to believe that . . . films and the radio were essentially for entertainment.” He went on to note that such “myopic views” hampered the “strides of both industries.” Films could not be converted into “a part of the educational department, as the toiling masses for the education of whom there were other programmes needed real good entertainment.” Patil cited in “Speech of Mr. S. S. Vasan, President, Film Federation of India on 30-3-1955,” Journal of the Film Industry 15 (April 1955): 9. “Speech of Mr. S. S. Vasan,” 7. Governmental apathy and misunderstanding were starkly manifest even for a celebrated film such as Pather Panchali that was completed with funds given by the government of West Bengal. The chief minister, Dr. B. C. Roy, famously regarded the film as a “documentary promoting rural uplift.” For more details, see Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 83–84. Marie Seton, “Journey Through India,” Sight and Sound 26, no. 4 (Spring 1957): 198; hereafter cited in text as JI. Usha Bhagat, Indiraji Through My Eyes (Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2005), 50–51. Bhagat, Indiraji, 51. Bhagat, Indiraji, 51.

1. Art Cinema 245 39. Seton, letter to James Kraft, 21 Nov. 1974, item 31, Various Letters, 1950–1970 collection, Marie Seton Papers, British Film Institute, London. 40. Marie Seton, “British and Canadian Films in America’s Middle West,” Sight and Sound 14, no. 55 (October 1, 1945): 94–95. For an account of her lectures to Italian film clubs in Venice and Bologna, see Marie Seton, “Italian Cine Clubs,” Film (Sept.–Oct. 1955): 16–18. Material related to her 1944 visit to the Documentary Film Group at the University of Chicago is available in Box 1, Folder 1, Documentary Film Group Records, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, Chicago. 41. The prize went to Neecha Nagar together with several others, namely Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini), Brief Encounter (David Lean), The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder), and Pastoral Symphony (Jean Delannoy). 42. Vsevolod Pudovkin also wrote an article on Chinnamul in Pravda on December 6, 1951 elaborating in particular on its realist intent; see Vsevolod Pudovkin, “The Uprooted,” in Chinnamul: Nemai Ghoshera Prabandha, Boktrita, Sakkhatkar [The uprooted: Essays, speeches, and interviews by Nemai Ghosh], ed. Sunipa Basu and Sibaditya Dasgupta (Calcutta: Cine Central and Monchasha, 2003), 139–42. 43. See Neepa Majumdar, “Importing Neorealism, Exporting Cinema,” in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), 178–93. 44. Marie Seton, “Problems of Filmmaking in India,” India International Centre Quarterly 2, no. 2 (April 1975): 139. This article is based on Seton’s lecture at the India International Center on March 10, 1975. 45. Marie Seton, Film as an Art and Film Appreciation (New Delhi: National Institute of Audio-Visual Education and National Council of Educational Research and Training, 1964), 4; hereafter cited in text as FA. 46. G. K. Athalye, “Foreword,” in Marie Seton, The Art of Five Directors: Film Appreciation (New Delhi: National Institute of Audio-Visual Education and National Council of Educational Research and Training, 1961). 47. Marie Seton, The Art of Five Directors (New Delhi: National Institute of Audio-Visual Education and National Council of Educational Research and Training, 1961), 3–4; hereafter cited in text and in notes as AFD. 48. In AFD, Seton cites the year of Bicycle Thieves as 1949. See AFD, 41. 49. Other names that appear in the text include such eminences of cinema such as V. I. Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, Mark Donskoi, and Dziga Vertov (from the USSR), John Grierson (for documentaries), Roberto Rossellini (from Italy), Charlie Chaplin, Carol Reed (Britain), and Jean Vigo (France). Seton’s 1964 book expands the list of directors much further. 50. Aside from the library, embassies, and consular offices, foreign films were difficult to procure and exhibit in India during that period. For details on the circulation and procurement of films within film societies and the inequities attendant in the process, see chapter 3. 51. Ray’s singularity in the Indian context is emphasized throughout the book. See AFD, 56–65, 67. 52. H. N. Narahari Rao, ed., The Film Society Movement in India (Mumbai: Asian Film Foundation, 2009), 24–35. Satish Bahadur, who was active in the Agra Film Society and became professor of film appreciation at the Film Institute in Poona, wrote about Seton and her role as technical advisor to the Federation of Films Societies, India, in numerous articles. As an example, see Satish Bahadur, “Screen Education at University Levels in India,” a report prepared for UNESCO for the Rome roundtable meeting, April 17–22, 1966, organized by UNESCO and European Center for Education,

246 1. Art Cinema

53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

accessed December  13, 2020, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000143727? posInSet=1&queryId=3d80762f-7cf5-4fb1-ae9e-69a8dbbf2625. Bhagat, Indiraji, 52–53. Also see Seton, “Problems of Filmmaking in India,” 139. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, “Amader Baktabya” [Our contention], Chitralekha 1, no. 1 (November 15, 1930): 7. Narendra Deb, “Chayar Maya” [The enchantment of shadows], Bharatbarsha, year 19, part 2, no. 1 (December/January 1931): 135–39. The articles serialized in the journal Bharatbarsha were later published as a book with the same title. Nikhil N. Sen, “Photogenique,” Filmland, Jan. 17, 1931, in Indian Cinema: Contemporary Perceptions from the Thirties, ed. Samik Bandyopadhyay (Jamshedpur: Celluloid Chapter, 1991), 59. Sen, “Photogenique,” 58–59. For a discussion of Bengali debates on films before the establishment of the Calcutta Film Society in 1947, see Moinak Biswas, “Bengali Film Debates: The Literary Liaison Revisited,” Journal of the Moving Image 1 (1999), http:// www.jmionline.org /article/ bengali_film_debates_the_literary_liaison_revisited. As an apocryphal anecdote has it, Satyajit Ray watched 99 films in 3 months when he traveled to England in 1950. So moved was he by Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) that on the journey home from London he began to write the screenplay for his debut feature, Pather Panchali. Mrinal Sen, “Antarjatik Chalachitra Utsab” (International Film Festival), in Bangla Bhashay Chalachitra Charcha, vol. 2, 1934–54, ed. Debiprasad Ghosh (Kolkata: Pratibhaash, 2011), 189. The enthusiasm and admiration for Italian neorealist films was also registered in the articles written by several individuals, Ray among them, as well as editorials from contemporary Bengali periodicals such as Desh. See Satyajit Ray, “Bastabera pathe Chalachitra” [Cinema on a realist path] and “Editorial,” in Bangla Bhashay, 19–23; 184–85. Satyajit Ray, “Ritwik Ghatak,” in Ritwik Ghatak, ed. Rajat Roy (Calcutta: Pratibhaash, 2011), 27; hereafter cited in text as RG. Indeed, Ajantrik has been the subject of new readings in recent years. See Moira Weigel, “Provincializing the Road Movie: Realism, Epic, and Mobility in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik,” in The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World, ed. Jose Duarte and Timothy Corrigan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 135–48. Ritwik Ghatak, “Of Art and Archetype,” in Ritwik Ghatak, Cinema India, ed. Shampa Banerjee (New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1982), 17. Priya Jaikumar’s discussion of Titas Ekti Nadir Naam offers a fascinating analysis of this. See Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 172–80. For a history of songs of this genre, see Rachel McDermott, Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Critics and filmmakers such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Geeta Kapur, and Kumar Shahani have variously seen in Ghatak the beginnings of an “alternative canon of Third Cinema.” They juxtapose his films with “profit-oriented cinemas” as well as “auteuroriented art cinema.” Taking issue with such an approach, Manishita Dass has recently argued in favor of Ghatak’s reception as an auteur and the ways in which his films are now categorized in India as “art films.” Manishita Dass, “The Cloud-Capped Star: Ritwik Ghatak on the Horizon of Global Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 249. See also Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to

2. The “New” Indian Cinema 247 the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982); Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Amrit Gangar, eds., Ghatak: Arguments/Stories by Kumar Shahani (Bombay: Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1987); Geeta Kapur, “Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (January 1993): 17–49; Ira Bhaskar, “Myth and Ritual: Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 3 (April 1983): 43–50; Erin O’Donnell, “History, Trauma and Remembering: The Construction of a Postcolonial Bengali Cultural Identity in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009).

2. The “New” Indian Cinema 1. Ahmed Rizvi and Parag Amladi, “Is There a New Cinema Movement?” in Cinema Vision India 1, no. 3 (1980): 4–13. Also see Jag Mohan, “Radical Perspectives for the Parallel Cinema in India,” 166–69; Dr. Gurudas Bhattacharya, “The Parallel Cinema,” 171–73; Feroze Rangoonwalla, “The Parallel Cinema: Approach and Organization,” 178–80; B. V. Dharap, “Parallel Cinema: Approach and Organization,” 181–85; and Rajan Narayan, “The Parallel Cinema,” 186–89, in Chitrabikshan Annual 1, no. 1 (1975). 2. See M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 160–216. On the avant-garde, see Aparna Frank, “An Indian Avant-Garde: Construction and Expression in Mani Kaul’s Dilemma Trilogy (1969–1973) and Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan (1972),” (PhD. diss., New York University, 2015). 3. Satyajit Ray, “An Indian New Wave?” Filmfare, October 8, 1971. Republished in Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976), 81–99. Hereafter abbreviated OF. 4. Satyajit Ray, “Four and a Quarter,” Indian Film Culture, no. 8 (Autumn 1974): 5–8. Republished in Ray, OF, 100–110. 5. Ray, OF, 81. 6. Ray, OF, 83. 7. Ray, OF, 83. 8. Ray, OF, 84. 9. Ray, OF, 84–85. 10. Ray, OF, 85. 11. Ray, OF, 85–86. 12. Ray, OF, 86. 13. Ray, OF, 87. 14. Ray, OF, 89. 15. Ray, OF, 98. 16. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020): 2–3. 17. Ray, OF, 90. 18. Ray, “Film Making,” OF, 56. 19. Satyajit Ray, “The Buccaneer of Bombay,” trans. Chitrita Banerji, in The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000), 573–74. “Double roles are all the rage these days. . . . They can be twins. Or they may not be related to each other at all. . . . The same appearance, but one is a good man and the other a villain, or one is smart and capable while the other is a nincompoop. . . . These days there’s a new rule— you cannot have too many fights. So the story will have to be plotted differently. . . . An hour and a half to build up the mystery, and another hour and a half to unravel it. . . .

248 2. The “New” Indian Cinema

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

You must have smuggling, gold, diamonds, marijuana, hashish, whatever; two or three chase sequences—in at least one of which an expensive car should be seen rolling down the mountainside; there must be one fire scene; the girlfriend of the hero must be the heroine, and the girlfriend of the villain has to be the vamp; you need a conscientious police officer; some flashback scenes for the hero; comic relief; fast action and change of scenes so that the plot does not sag; if you can, shift the scene to the mountains or to the beach occasionally, so that your stars don’t have to keep on shooting in the cramped atmosphere of a studio . . . and finally—this is a must—you have to have a happy ending. But if before that you can make the tears flow, so much the better.” Ray, “An Indian New Wave?,” OF, 92. Ray, OF, 95–96. Ray, OF, 99. Ray, “Four and a Quarter,” OF, 100. Ray, OF, 106. Ray, OF, 106. Bikram Singh’s first article was published in Filmfare as “More About the Indian New Wave,” Jan. 14, 1972, 21–25. Ray sent in a response, “Satyajit Ray writes,” (February 25, 1972), 31–32. Singh responded in the same issue of the magazine “Bikram Singh replies,” 32–33. As noted by Singh in his essay, “though Mr. Ray has congratulated the Film Finance Corporation on its ‘admirable courage and enterprise’ in backing ‘young and untested applicants’ aspiring to make off-beat films, there are around people who have already got busy using his article as a stick with which to beat the ‘New Wave’ film makers and their supporters.” Singh, “More About the Indian New Wave,” 21. Some scholars, notably Ira Bhaskar, argue that the Indian new cinema continued into the 1990s. In view of the historical factors discussed here, my periodization situates new cinema in the 1960s–1970s spilling over into the early 1980s with figures such as John Abraham and women directors such as Aparna Sen and Sai Paranjape. See Ira Bhaskar, “The Indian New Wave,” chapter 3 of Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, ed. K. Moti Gokulsing, Wimal Dissanayake, and Rohit Dasgupta (New York: Routledge, 2013), accessed on August 23, 2020, https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203556054. Bikram Singh, “Cinema and Literature—Where Does the Viewer stand?” Filmfare, January 26, 1973. For different views on new cinema, see O. K. Johny, “The Indian New Wave Must Change,” trans. Jenson Joseph, Mathrubhoomi Annual Weekly Special (2013): 88–97, accessed on December  20, 2017, https://indiancine.ma/documents/BPT. Shyam Benegal refers to the failure of Indian filmmakers to make “political cinema” of the kind present in Latin America. See Rizvi and Amladi, “Is There a New Cinema Movement?,” 7–8; Iqbal Masud, “It Was Time for the New Cinema” in Uma de Cunha, ed., Film India: The New Generation, 1960–1980 (New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1981), 16. Masud uses the expression “regional” cinema with reference to new cinema in South India, and “political” films with reference to Govind Nihalani and Sayeed Mirza. Chidananda Dasgupta, Seeing Is Believing (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2008), 4. Chidananda Dasgupta, “New Directions in Indian Cinema,” Film Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 42. Mrinal Sen and Arun Kaul, “Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement,” in Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 166. See Sangeeta Datta, Shyam Benegal (New Delhi: Roli, 2003), 26.

2. The “New” Indian Cinema 249 34. “The Cinema Situation: A Symposium on the Struggle for a Genuine Expression,” special issue, Seminar (December 1974). 35. Mani Kaul, “Communication,” in “The Cinema Situation: A Symposium on the Struggle for a Genuine Expression,” special issue, Seminar (December 1974), 21. 36. Kaul, “Communication,” 22. 37. Kaul, “Communication,” 22. 38. Ray, “An Indian New Wave?” OF, 97–98. 39. Kaul, “Communication,” 22. 40. Kaul, “Communication,” 21. 41. Kumar Shahani, “Myths for Sale,” reprinted in Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, ed. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (New Delhi: Tulika, 2015), 106. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s brief commentary, 101. The “humanist in the box office” was probably a reference to the likes of Ray and Benegal, while the globetrotting socialite could have been a reference to some well-known female film critic of the time. 42. Kumar Shahani, “The Necessity of a Code,” in Kumar Shahani, 110–15. 43. Shahani, Kumar Shahani, 113. 44. Shahani, Kumar Shahani, 113. 45. Shahani, Kumar Shahani, 112. 46. “Symposium on Parallel Cinema,” Chitrabikshan Annual (1975): 154. 47. “Symposium on Parallel Cinema,” 189. 48. “Parallel Cinema Must Cultivate Fan Patronage,” Screen, January 17, 1975, 15. 49. R. Ramakrishna, “A Doctrinaire Approach,” Screen, February 18, 1972, 1, 4. 50. Ramakrishna, “A Doctrinaire Approach,” 4. 51. Ramakrishna, “A Doctrinaire Approach,” 4. 52. Dileep Padgaonkar, “The Parallel Stream,” Seminar (Dec. 1974): 27. 53. Padgaonkar, “The Parallel Stream,” 28. 54. “There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection. . . . Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull towards emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.” Susan Sontag, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 177. 55. Padgaonkar, “The Parallel Stream,” 30. 56. “The Cinema Situation,” Seminar, 10–11. Emphasis mine. 57. Padgaonkar, “The Parallel Stream,” 30. 58. Chidananda Dasgupta, “The ‘New’ Cinema: A Wave or a Future?” in Indian Cinema Superbazar, ed. Aruna Vasudev and Philippe Lenglet (Delhi: Vikas, 1983), 39. 59. Dasgupta, “The ‘New’ Cinema,” 41. 60. Chidananda Dasgupta, “New Directions in Indian Cinema,” Film Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 32–42. 61. K. A. Abbas, “The Indian New Wave,” Indian Film Culture, no. 8 (Autumn 1974): 14. 62. Abbas, “The Indian New Wave,” 14 63. Abbas, “The Indian New Wave,” 15 64. Dasgupta, “New Directions,” 36. 65. Dasgupta, “New Directions,” 36. 66. Dasgupta, “New Directions,” 36. 67. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “India: Filming the Nation,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 684.

250 2. The “New” Indian Cinema 68. Bhaskar, “The Indian New Wave”; M. Madhava Prasad, The Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Reconstruction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 69. Aparna Frank, “An Indian Avant-Garde” (PhD. diss., New York University, 2015), 2n3. 70. Frank, “An Indian Avant-Garde,” 26. 71. Frank, “An Indian Avant-Garde,” 12. 72. Satyajit Ray, Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema, ed. Sandip Ray (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2011), 59. 73. Ray, Deep Focus, 59. 74. Ray, Deep Focus, 62. 75. Ray, Deep Focus, 67. 76. Committee on Public Undertakings, Government of India, Committee on Public Undertakings (1975–1976), Seventy-Ninth Report, Film Finance Corporation Limited (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1976), 4–5. These guidelines had been in place since October 22, 1971. 77. Committee on Public Undertakings, Committee on Public Undertakings, 4–5. Metropolitan cities at the time referred to Delhi, Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata), and Madras (Chennai). 78. Cited in Aruna Vasudev, The New Indian Cinema (Delhi: Macmillan, 1986), 32. 79. Vasudev, The New Indian Cinema, 33. 80. Anil Dharker, “The FFC Story,” Cinema Vision India 1, no. 3 (1980): 18. 81. Dharker, “The FFC Story,” 18. 82. B. K. Karanjia, Counting My Blessings (Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2005), 193. Hereafter CMB. 83. Karanjia, CMB, 193. 84. In 1971, a ceiling was imposed whereby there could be no more than six stars per film. Karanjia, CMB, 187. 85. Karanjia’s autobiography listed films such as Pugree (P. N. Arora) that was a “frame by frame” copy of It Happened on Fifth Avenue. Daag had remarkable similarities with Sunflower, Koshish with the Japanese film Happiness of Us Alone, Parichay with Sound of Music, Manoranjan with Irma la Douce, Do Kaliyan with A Man and a Woman, and Khoon Khoon with Dirty Harry. Karanjia, CMB, 185–86. 86. Karanjia, CMB, 194. 87. Karanjia, CMB, 194. 88. He cites Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen, 1969), adapted from a story by the Bangla author Banaphool; Sara Akash (Basu Chatterjee, 1969), based on a short story by Rajendra Yadav initially published as Pret Bolte Hain (Ghosts speak) and later renamed in 1960s to the same title as the film; Uski Roti (Mani Kaul, 1969), adapted from a story by Mohan Rakesh; Maya Darpan (Kumar Shahani, 1972), after a story by Nirmal Verma; 27 Down (Awtar Kaul, 1974), based on a short story titled Athara Sooraj Ke Paudhe by Ramesh Bakshi; Dastak (1970) by Rajinder Singh Bedi, who was both the director and writer of the film; Garam Hawa (M. S. Sathyu, 1973), based on a story by Ismat Chughtai; and Kaadu (Girish Karnad, 1973), on a story by Srikrishna Alanahalli. Perhaps carried away by his stirring recollection of the new wave, Karanjia includes films such as Kanku, a Gujarati film directed by Kantilal Rathod based on a story by the Gujarati author Pannalal Shah, as part of the FFC’s role in the new cinema endeavor, when Rathod in an essay published in 1980 noted that “Kanku was refused a government loan because it was ‘too realistic.’ ” See Kantilal Rathod, “Change for the Worse: Gujarat,” Cinema Vision India 1, no. 3 (1980): 47. 89. Karanjia, CMB, 196.

2. The “New” Indian Cinema 251 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

Dharker, “The FFC Story,” 19. Dharker, “The FFC Story,” 19. Dharker, “The FFC Story,” 20. Appendix VI and VII, “Statement of Awards and Decrees,” in Committee on Public Undertakings (1975–1976), Seventy-Ninth Report, Film Finance Corporation Limited, 162– 67. Loans were outstanding for films such as Uski Roti, Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe, Bilet Pherat, Trisandhya, Kanku, Sara Akash, Ek Adhuri Kahani, and scores of others. Dasgupta, “The ‘New’ Cinema,” 42. See Antoine de Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 130–31. Bikram Singh, “Cinema and Literature: Where Does the Viewer Stand?” Filmfare, January 26, 1973, 31. Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (New Delhi: Roli, 2010); Kaushik Bhaumik, “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford), 2001. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was the most popular author whose works were adapted to cinema. Bhaumik shows how popular literature in Urdu drew from pulp fiction in the West (authors such as Edgar Wallace), and then repurposed them into Hindi cinema. Bombay cinema drew upon Zafar Umar’s Neeli Chhatri, Bahram ki Giraftari, and Lal Kathor, that were updates of imported adventure literature in Oriental settings, many of which were published by the Darul Isha‘at Press. The Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, the puranas, and tales of the god Krishna were also the source of innumerable films. See Bhaumik, “Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry,” 57–65, 99–104. Mukul Kesavan, “Urdu, Awadh and Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema,” Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 244–57. Ray, Deep Focus, 62–63. See Bikram Singh, “Cinema and Literature: Where Does the Viewer Stand?,” Filmfare, January 26, 1973, 31–33. Singh, “Cinema and Literature,” 31. Singh, “Cinema and Literature,” 31. Singh, “Cinema and Literature,” 33. Singh, “Cinema and Literature,” 33. Singh, “Cinema and Literature,” 33. Singh, “Cinema and Literature,” 33. Sheldon Pollock, “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 1 (2001): 3–31; on taza gui, see Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the IndoPersian State Secretary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). Cited in Aparna Dharwadker, “Modernism, ‘Tradition,’ and History in the Postcolony: Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal (1972),” Theater Journal 65, no. 4 (2013): 468. Lucy Rosenstein, “Sacetan Kahani and Samantar Kahani: Principal Movements in the Hindi Short Story of the 1960s and ’70s,” South Asia Research 13, no. 2 (1993): 117–31. Madhu Singh, “Altered Realities, New Experiences: Bhisham Sahni, Nirmal Verma, and the Nayi Kahani Movement,” Comparative Literature Studies 53, no. 2 (2016): 315. On debates around nayi kahani see Gordon C. Roadarmel, Modern Hindi Short Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Sukrita Paul Kumar, The New Story: A Scrutiny of Modernity in Hindi and Urdu Short Fiction (New Delhi: Allied, 1991).

252 2. The “New” Indian Cinema 110. Datta, Shyam Benegal, 64. Both Benegal and Gopalakrishnan also received funding for their later feature films from the FFC, and subsequently the NFDC. 111. D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxiii. 112. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 187. 113. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “All That He Wanted Was to Make That Film: Kundan Shah (1947–2017),” Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 49 (2017): 36. 114. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 190. 115. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 192. 116. Mrinal Sen, Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema, ed. Samik Bandyopadhyay (Kolkata: Seagull, 2018): 77–81, 123–28. 117. Sen, Montage, 124. 118. Sen, Montage, 124. 119. Bachchan was not yet a star and was shooting for K. A. Abbas’s Saat Hindustani (Seven Indians, 1969) at the time. 120. Sen’s recollection of these opening scenes was as follows: “Bhuvan Shome was an ornithologist. To emphasize this aspect, animated birds were shown flying around his head. Further, the opening and closing of files, the swinging of doors, telephone calls, were also animated. This use of animation was an experiment yet to be tried at the time. I used mask shots to express the thoughts of Bhuvan Shome.” Sen, Montage, 126. 121. Parag Amladi, “The Rule and the Exception: Good Offices and Bad in Bhuvan Shome,” in The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen, ed. Sumita Chakravarty (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks, 2000), 26. 122. Amladi, “The Rule,” 26. 123. Amladi, “The Rule,” 26–27. 124. Sen, Montage, 78. 125. The names Gauri and Jadhav Patel in the text version are Bindiya and Sakhi Chand. See Banaphool, “Bhuvan Shome,” Wildfire and Other Stories, trans. Somnath Zutshi (Kolkata: Seagull, 1999), 145–220. 126. Sen, Montage, 127. 127. Sen, Montage, 128. 128. Sen, Montage, 126–27. 129. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 63. 130. Mrinal Sen, Always Being Born (New Delhi: Stellar, 2004), 96. 131. Daniel Morgan, “Andre Bazin and the Realist Avant-Garde,” paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, 2015. Also see Andre Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 30. 132. Films such as Kashmir ki Kali (Bud of Kashmir, 1964), Junglee (Subodh Mukherjee, 1961), and Madhumati (Bimal Roy, 1958) were huge box office successes that use this trope. 133. One of the most generative formulations of postcolonial “sly civility” is in Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 93–101. 134. Arjun Appadurai, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6, no. 1 (2019): 140– 52; Ranjani Mazumdar, “Repetition with a Difference: A Response to Arjun Appadurai,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6, no. 3 (2019): 371–76.

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135. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Belatedness as Possibility: The Subaltern Subject and the Problem of Repetition in World History,” in The Crises of Civilization (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4.

3. Debating Radical Cinema 1. Anil Varshney, “Highlights of FFSI’s Twenty-One Years,” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1, published on the occasion of the 8th International Film Festival of India, Delhi (January 1981): 73. According to Varshney, even though 60 film societies closed down during this period, the growth of such societies outstripped the number of closures. 2. Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge, 2005), 16. 3. Mrigankasekhar Roy, “Birth of a Film Culture,” in Chalachitra Charcha, published during the 13th Calcutta Film Festival, no. 18 (2009): 41. Such an understanding of cinema is reminiscent of the ways in which the Progressive Writers Association had once articulated their manifesto in the 1930s: “under the limitations of India, through the disintegration of our values . . . the ossification of our political and social forces, the task of our writers is an immensely difficult one. A great literature will be born among us as our struggle advances, as we master aesthetic forms, as we attain the sincerity through which alone it is possible to mould artistic talent and achieve works which approximate to the demands of the subject matter . . . it means the shifting of the standards of criticism which we naively adopted under the influence of the subjective, idealist, individualist, bourgeois point of view which arbitrarily judges literature from the criterion of what is or is not in ‘bad taste’ . . . to what is called social realism,” Manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association, cited in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, 1936–1947, 1, ed. Sudhi Pradhan (Calcutta: Mrs. Santi Pradhan, 1979), 7–8. 4. Two recent works on the history of Indian film societies focus on their institutional role in archiving Indian cinema and on cinephilia. See Ramesh Kumar, “National Archives: Policies, Practices, and Histories” (PhD. diss., New York University, December 2016); Abhija Ghosh, “Memories of Action: Tracing Film Society Cinephilia in India,” Bioscope 9, no. 2 (2018): 137–64. Also see V. K. Cherian, India’s Film Society Movement (New Delhi: Sage, 2017). Two documentaries 16 mm (K. R. Manoj, 2007) and Celluloid Man (Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, 2012) contain valuable information on the film society movement in Kerala and on P. K. Nair, the first archivist of the NFAI, and his role in film societies. 5. There were a few directors associated with the mainstream film industries whose works were well received in film society circles. They included Bimal Roy, Nitin Bose, K. A. Abbas, and V. Shantaram. 6. The political leanings of a majority of film society activists were toward the Left. This is not to suggest that all members of film societies belonged to the Communist Party of India (CPI). As Gopal notes in her study of the PWA and IPTA, while many artists and writers associated with these movements had links to the CPI, “it is incorrect to reduce the organization’s mandate . . . to that of a cultural front for or of the CPI,” in Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 17. These remarks are equally applicable to the film society movement. While many cine activists, notably Sen, had some links to the party that were demonstrated in the political radicalism that suffused their cinema and writings, there were also numerous others like Ray who did not have any formal

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

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affiliation with the CPI. Yet Ray, too, like earlier affiliates of the PWA and IPTA, maintained broadly leftist leanings. Ghatak was expelled from the CPI in 1955 for a document he authored entitled “On the Cultural Front.” For more details, see Erin O’Donnell, “Woman and Homeland in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films: Constructing PostIndependence Bengali Cultural Identity,” Jump Cut no. 47 (2004), accessed on December  13, 2020, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/ghatak /text.html. Malayalam language filmmakers G. Aravindan and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who were influential in establishing film societies as cooperative bodies in Kerala, a communist-ruled southern Indian state, were left-identified. A latter-day film society activist and director, Kumar Shahani, saw himself as part of a global leftist avantgarde. A telling testimony of this comes in a letter he wrote to his fellow filmmaker, Mani Kaul, from Paris in 1968 when he joined in the demonstrations protesting against the removal of Henri Langlois, the cofounder of the Cinémathèque Française, which brought such figures as Truffaut, Chabrol, and Godard, among others, to the streets. Kumar Shahani, “A Letter from Paris,” Movement, 15 December 1971. It was not only such well-known personalities of nonmainstream Indian cinema, but the rank and file of film societies who were ardent leftists—some card-carrying members of the communist party, others Naxalites (Maoists in the 1960s and 1970s), and still others who harbored pronounced anti-state, left-oriented sympathies without any party affiliation. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy in their influential study of Indian cinema argue that it was not until the mid-sixties that the movement acquired prominence in places such as Delhi, Kerala, and Hyderabad. See Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 249–50. I will demonstrate that the film society movement from the earliest years was all-India in scope. David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), x. Chidananda Dasgupta dates the founding of this society to 1937, in Chidananda Dasgupta, Seeing Is Believing (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2008), 84. Anil Srivastava, “Questionnaire for Film Societies in India,” Indian Film Society News (Pune: National Film Archives of India, 1964), 11. H. N. Narahari Rao, ed., The Film Society Movement in India (Mumbai: Asian Film Foundation, 2009), 26; hereafter FSMI. Dasgupta, Seeing Is Believing, 84. I. K. Gujral, who also served as prime minister for a brief period and was a minister of information and broadcasting in the 1970s, served as treasurer of the Federation of Film Societies. Srivastava, “Questionnaire,” 2. Also see “Recollections,” in “21 Years of FFSI,” IFSON Special Number 3, no.1 (January 1981): 10. The latter article was a reprint of an early report on the CFS that appeared in the May–June 1949 issue of Indian Documentary edited by Jag Mohan. Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976), 7. Vijaya Mulay, “Patna Film Society,” IFSON Special number, 16. Rao, ed., FSMI, 19–20, emphasis mine. Ray, Our Films Their Films, 12. Chidananda Dasgupta, “Film Society Movement in India (1965),” in IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1, published on the occasion of the 8th International Film Festival of India, Delhi (January 1981): 30. For discussions on the political and cultural significance of popular cinema, see Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (Austin: University of

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

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Texas Press, 1993); Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (London: Cassell, 2000); Rachel Dwyer, All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India (New York: Cassell, 2000); Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, Pleasure and the Nation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Ravi Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); M. S. S. Pandian, The Image Trap: M. G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1992); Sowmya Dechamma and Sathya Prakash, eds., Cinemas of South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (New Delhi: Roli, 2010). Rao, ed., FSMI, 20; emphasis in the original. Ray, Our Films Their Films, 6. Gopalakrishnan cited in Gautaman Bhaskaran, Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life in Cinema (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2010), 68. Muriel Wasi, “Delhi Film Society,” in H. N. Narahari Rao, ed., The Film Society Movement in India (Mumbai: Asian Film Foundation, 2009), 27. Wasi, “Delhi Film Society,” 27. Vijaya Mulay, “Patna Film Society,” IFSON Special Number, 16. Mulay, “Patna Film Society,” 32–33. For details on the paucity of publications from other regions as well as more details on film society publications see Mrigankasekhar Roy, “Film Society Andolan: Ekti Khatiyan” [Film society movement: An assessment], Chitrabhaash, year 11, nos. 3–4 (1976): 223–30. From the early 1970s, the number of publications from film societies based in southern India grew. See Rao, ed., FMSI, 136–39; 170–86. Srivastava, “Questionnaire,” 2. Srivastava, “Questionnaire,” 3. Srivastava, “Questionnaire,” 7. According to the well-known singer and musician, Hemanga Biswas, the Russian delegation had a deep impact on many young Bengali cineastes. He wrote, “Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, and Utpal Dutt were already involved in very serious thinking about cinema though they hadn’t yet been able to make one. But I noticed Ritwik carrying on long discussions with them (Pudovkin and Cherkasov) on cinema based on his sound knowledge and deep understanding of Eisenstein and Pudovkin.” Cited in Haimanti Banerjee, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak: A Monograph (Pune: National Film Archive of India, 1985), 14. Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 24. Jag Mohan, “Impact of the Film Society Movement,” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981): 38. For a detailed account on the challenges of expanding the membership of the Calcutta Film Society, see Ram Halder, Kathakata Kamalalaya O Proshongo Film Society (Calcutta: Anustup, 1989), 44–48; hereafter abbreviated as KK. Chidananda Dasgupta, “Chalachitra Andolon: Kolkata Film Society,” Chalachitra (Calcutta: Signet, 1950), 155. Halder, KK, 47. Reservations about swelling the membership ranks were not peculiar to the Calcutta Film Society alone. Muriel Wasi, a founding member of the Delhi Film Society also

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

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held the view that the only “passport to a film society” should be a passionate interest in serious cinema. Muriel Wasi, “More About the Delhi Film Society,” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981): 66. Banerjee, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, 15. Anonymous, “The Front Cover,” Indian Film Culture, no. 4 (September 1964): 12. Anonymous, “Madras Film Society,” IFSON Special Number 3, no.  1 (January 1981): 15. Indian Documentary (July–September 1955). Barnouw and Krishnaswamy write that film societies were charged the same censorship rates as commercial theaters. “After January 1951, they included a fee of Rs. 40 per reel for films over 2,000 feet. A complete script, a synopsis in eight copies, and texts of songs in eight copies were needed.” Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 188. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 189. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 249. A report compiled by Dr. Anil Varshney provides the following figures for the number of films imported. The films came mostly from foreign missions and in a few cases from the Film Finance Corporation (later renamed the National Film Development Corporation) and the National Film Archive of India. Anil Varshney, “Highlights of FFSI’s Twenty-one Years,” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981): 73. Year 1960–1964 1964–1967 1967–1971 1971–1975

Features 30 110 200 160

Shorts 20 45 100 110

47. Dasgupta, “Film Society Movement in India (1965),” 32. 48. Varshney, “Highlights,” 74. 49. Arun Kaul, “Film Society Movement (1965–1970),” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981): 37. The same report cited earlier, compiled by Dr. Anil Varshney, offers “a model representation” of the circulation of films between big city-based film societies and those located in small towns (mofussils). These figures are from 1978–1981. No figures are available for earlier years. Varshney, “Highlights,” 74. Northern Region Eastern Region Western Region Southern Region

Delhi Mofussil areas Calcutta Mofussil areas Bombay Mofussil areas Madras Mofussil areas

85 55 45 30 60 35 40 20

50. Ghosh, “Memories of Action,” 141. 51. Anil Srivastava, “Bhopal Kids, Lucknow Film Society and IFSON,” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981): 69. 52. Srivastava, “Bhopal Kids,” 69. 53. Halder, KK, 43.

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54. Halder, KK, 43–44. 55. For more details on the making of Pather Panchali (and the shelving of Home and the World), see Gooptu, Bengali Cinema, 223–27. 56. For example, the Bombay group would directly contact the Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting or Indira Gandhi, the minister, every time they encountered the hurdle of censorship before showing a particular foreign film. 57. Halder, KK, 53. 58. Halder, KK, 55–56. 59. Halder, KK, 60; words in parenthesis mine. 60. Halder, KK, 52. 61. Halder, KK, 48. 62. Halder, KK, 55. 63. Halder, KK, 53. 64. David Bordwell, “Studying Cinema” (2000), DavidBordwell.net, accessed February 25, 2021, http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/studying.php. 65. The endeavors of early film society activists share certain resemblances with Bordwell’s descriptions of film fans. “Fan subcultures love to describe their favorite scenes, often in great detail, and sometimes they engage in analysis. Fans are also highly evaluative in their talk . . . but in intriguing ways the specialized discourse of fans runs parallel to that of academics,” in Bordwell, “Studying Cinema.” 66. Dasgupta, “Film Society Movement in India (1965),” 31. 67. Dasgupta, “Film Society Movement in India (1965),” 31. 68. Dasgupta, “Film Society Movement in India (1965),” 31. 69. Roy, “Birth of a Film Culture,” 38. 70. Comparing Indian popular cinema with such cinematic genres abroad as the Western, the musical, the crime thriller, or suspense film, Dasgupta remarked “the fact remains that these vastly popular forms . . . are basically cinema, no matter how far removed they may be from Bergman or Kurosawa or Satyajit Ray. The average product of the Indian film industry is not cinema at all; it is some totally indescribable entity which by sheer accident uses celluloid to propagate itself.” Dasgupta, “Film Society Movement in India (1965),” 31. 71. Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray, 24. 72. Mrigankasekhar Roy, “Film Society Andolan: Ekti Khatiyan” [Film society movement: An assessment], Chitrabhaash, nos. 3–4 (1976): 223–29. 73. These numbers are taken from two reports published in IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981). See “Editorial,” 2–3, and “Highlights of FFSI’s Twenty- One Years,” 73–76. 74. For more details on the economic crises facing Nehruvian India, see Ranajit Sau, Indian Economic Growth: Constraints and Prospects (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1973); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 205–11. For an overview of internal insurgencies, external conflicts with Pakistan and China, and the crisis that eventually led to the declaration of national emergency in 1975, see Ramchandra Guha, India After Gandhi (New Delhi: Picador, 2007). 75. Roy, “Birth of a Film Culture,” 41. 76. The place of this movement in the national imaginary can be gauged by the fact that films continue to be made about it. Notable examples include Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (Sudhir Mishra, 2003) and Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (Govind Nihalani, 1998).

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77. For details on the Naxalite movement, see Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980); Marcus F. Franda, Political Development and Political Decay in Bengal (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971); Marcus F. Franda and Paul Brass, eds., Radical Politics in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973). For a history of the political situation in India, and particularly Bengal, post 1947, see Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 78. Cited in Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 239. 79. Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema, 233. 80. Cited in Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema, 238. 81. On the Emergency, see Arvind Rajagopal, “The Emergency as the Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no.  5 (Sept 2011): 1003–49; Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Gyan Prakash, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 82. See, for example, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Talking Films: Conversations with Javed Akhtar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75–76. 83. Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema, 227. 84. Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 6–7. For more details on Third Cinema manifestoes, see the essays by Teshome Gabriel and Paul Willemen in the same volume. 85. Willemen and Pines, Questions of Third Cinema, 5. 86. Kaul, “Film Society Movement,” 36. 87. For a study of similar questions in literary radicalism in India, see Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India, and Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority / Acts of Resistance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 88. Shuvendu Dasgupta, “Ekjon Chalachitra Andolon Karmir Sakhatkar” [Interview with a cinema worker], Silhouette, no. 4 (December 2004): 97. 89. Dasgupta, “Ekjon Chalachitra Andolon Karmir Sakhatkar,” 101. 90. A. K. Pramanick, “The Film Society Movement in India,” Chitralekha (1974): 16–17. 91. “Chalachitra Andolan ki Byarthotar Pathe?” [Is the film-society movement heading toward failure?], report on a discussion organized by North Calcutta Film Society, Cine Club of Naihati, and Film Study Circle, Asansol, Chitrabhaash 18, no. 1 (1984): 50. For a broader discussion on the charge that many joined film societies to watch films that were sexually explicit, see Suchitra Balasubrmaniam, Sagarmoy Paul, and Arvind Lodaya, “Film Society Movement—An Overview,” in IFSON, Special Silver Jubilee Number (1984): 82–84. The 1984 issue of IFSON, which was published to mark the silver jubilee of the Federation, carried several articles that speculated on the reasons behind the eclipse of the film society movement from the early eighties onward. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “A Film Society Movement,” 50–51; Sanjiv Jhaveri, “Membership Imbroglio,” 85–87; and all the articles contained under “Ahmedabad Conference,” 71–90. 92. See Dhruba Gupta, “Film Society Andoloner Uddesho aar Samasya” [The aims and problems of the film society movement], in Chalachitra Katha, ed. Ashis Ghosh (Calcutta, 1981), 291–96. 93. “Chalachitra Andolan ki Byarthotar Pathe?,” 51.

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94. G. Aravindan, “Interviews,” in special number, “Twenty-Five Years of the Film Society Movement,” IFSON (1984): 15. 95. Mention of film festivals of this kind—in villages, in factories—abound in film society writings. For examples see Shuvendu Dasgupta, Chalachitra Anya Prabandha (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1999). 96. The latter probably meant that the village had a school where instruction was offered up to the tenth grade. 97. K. S. Raghavendra, “An Experiment with Rural Audience: Festival of Film Classics in a Remote Village in Karnataka,” IFSON Special Number 3, no. 1 (January 1981): 41. 98. Raghavendra, “An Experiment,” 41. Words in parenthesis in the original. 99. Raghavendra, “An Experiment,” 45. 100. Raghavendra, “An Experiment,” 41. 101. Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Kulathoor Bhaskaran Nair, A Scheme for Setting Up of Art Theatres in Kerala (Trivandrum: Chitralekha Cooperative, April 7, 1973). 102. Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India, 4–12. Rajadhyaksha also comments on the explicit link made by directors like Kumar Shahani in his writings, anthologized in Framework, between the aesthetics and politics of filmmaking and similar debates, both contemporary and earlier, in theater, literature, and other visual arts. Rajadhyaksha briefly mentions the polemical writings by (and about) the three directors under discussion here. See Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema, 242–49. 103. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism. 104. The films included Devi (The Goddess, 1959), Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1960), Kanchenjungha (1961), Abhijan (The Expedition, 1962), Mahanagar (The Big City, 1962), Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1963), Kapurush O Mahapurush (The Coward and the Holy Man, 1964), and Nayak (The Hero, 1965). For a rather heated and acerbic exchange between Ashok Rudra, Marie Seton, and Satyajit Ray around the film Abhijan, see Marie Seton, “Satyajit Ray’s Abhijan,”; A. Rudra, “Satyajit Ray’s Optimism”; and “Satyajit Answers Critics,” in Film Polemics, ed. Shuvendu Dasgupta and Sakti Basu (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 9–10. Hereafter abbreviated FP. 105. Dasgupta and Basu, FP, 17. 106. Dasgupta and Basu, FP, 21. 107. Anonymous letter dated September 1, 1973, in the section entitled “Chocolate Cream Hunger” in Film Polemics, ed. Shuvendu Dasgupta and Sakti Basu (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 104–5. 108. Ashok Rudra, “In Defence of Padatik,” in Film Polemics, ed. Shuvendu Dasgupta and Sakti Basu (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 95. 109. Prabodh Dhar Chakraborty, “Letter,” in the section entitled “Anger and After” in Film Polemics, ed. Shuvendu Dasgupta and Sakti Basu (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 89–90. 110. Chakraborty, “Letter,” 89–90. 111. Of particular note were Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud- Capped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E-Flat, 1961), Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962), Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (The River Named Titas, 1973), and Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Tale, 1974). 112. Cited in Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 228. 113. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “Ritwik Ghatak,” in Film Polemics, ed. Shuvendu Dasgupta and Sakti Basu (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 152. 114. Bagchi, “Ritwik Ghatak,” 154.

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115. Bagchi, “Ritwik Ghatak,” 154–55. Ghatak’s commitment to cinematically representing the chaotic nature of political decisions—past and present—was perhaps best illustrated in the lines uttered by the dying protagonist Neelkantha of Jukti Takko aar Gappo: “What political line or which ideology will steer the Indian or Bengal situation to the correct path, I do not know. I am confused, fully confused—I am searching, still searching. Are we all confused?” This scene is invoked in many film society writings on Ghatak. Neelkantha (the blue-throated one), which is another name of the god Shiva, the Hindu deity whose throat had turned blue from the poison he drank to preserve the universe, was Ghatak’s flawed intellectual protagonist. Ghatak’s works, despite his inability to complete many projects or secure funding from the state, and his failure to win over large popular audiences, were seen by film society activists both in Bengal and elsewhere as one that most prominently bore the marks of the uncertainties that plagued every aspect of life in the postcolonial nation-state. For more detailed accounts of these views, see the essays collected in one of the Federation of Film Societies for India (Eastern Region) publications: Gautam Ghosh and Suranjan Ray, eds., Chitrabhabna [Thoughts on films], Ritwik Special Number (1997). 116. Khalid Mohamed, “The Movement to Blossom,” 47–49; V. K. Dharamsey, “Perish We May,” in Amrit Gangar and V. K. Dharamsey, eds., IFSON special number (1984): 60–64. 117. Film societies had from the first phase been engaged in making documentaries like Durga Puja, Portrait of a City, and A City by the Sea. 118. This statement by Arun Kaul was made with particular reference to Kumar Shahani’s films in IFSON (1984): 89. 119. The Bangladeshi film society journals featured many of the same authors—Joris Ivens, Bertolt Brecht in translation—alongside essays and interviews with Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak. Film societies in both places were fired by a leftist political faith in the association of the moving image with freedom from oppression. Lotte Hoek, “Pictures on Paper: Censoring Cinematic Culture Through the Bangladesh Film Club Act,” Terrain: Anthropologie and Sciences Humaines, no. 72 (November 2019), https:// journals.openedition.org /terrain/19361. 120. For one example of essays by each of these individuals, see the collection edited by  Sakti Basu and Shuvendu Dasgupta, Chalachitre Bitarka [Debates on cinema] (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992). 121. For an analysis of the ways in which some film society members, notably Chidananda Dasgupta and Kobita Sarkar, neglected to take seriously the nature of popular audiences, see Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 75–81. 122. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 57–123.

4. Ritwik Ghatak and the Overcoming of History 1. Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 201. 2. Satyajit Ray, “Foreword,” Row and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000), x (first published in the first edition of Ritwik Ghatak, Cinema and I, in January 1987).

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3. Other than in Titas Ekti Nadir Naam, Bengali Muslims are largely absent from his films. 4. Ritwik Ghatak, “On Subarnarekha” (trans. Moinak Biswas), Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 18. Hereafter abbreviated as OS. 5. See Moinak Biswas, “Her Mother’s Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak,” Rouge, no. 3, 2004, http://www.rouge.com.au/3/ghatak .html. Also see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 25–26 (1993): 55–70. 6. Samik Bandyopadhyay, “Ritwik Ghatak: Theater e Cinemay” [Ritwik Ghatak: In cinema and theater], in Ritiwk o tar chhabi, ed. Rajat Roy, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Annapurna Pustak Mandir, 1983), 115. 7. Bandyopadhyay, “Ritwik Ghatak,” 109. 8. Ashish Rajadhyaksha writes about the variety of sounds, such as the sound of rice boiling, crickets chirping, children narrating tables, as well as the ragas Hamsadhvani and Malhar, and one rabindrasangeet in Meghe Dhaka Tara. His primary focus is on the ragas. The effect of the latter, he argues, is “more significant than narration; it is to the film what the landscape was to Eisenstein, ‘the freest element in the film, liberated from the tasks of narration.’ The freeing of sound and then its juxtaposition with the much more culture-specific visual language is what enables the pathos to move beyond cultural barriers.” See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak, A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982), 68–73. A recent Bengali article and Manishita Dass’s volume on Meghe Dhaka Tara discusses its soundscape. Sukanta Majumdar, “Meghe Dhaka Tara: Bharatiyo cinemar soundtracker ekti milestone” [Meghe Dhaka Tara: A milestone in the soundtrack of Indian cinema], Pratirodher Cinema, year 6, no. 1 (January 2019): 19–27; Manishita Dass, The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) (London: BFI Classics, 2020) discusses the songs and other sound effects of Meghe Dhaka Tara with reference to her notion of “cinematic theatricality.” 9. Bhaskar Chandavarkar, “The Man Who Went Beyond Stop,” Cinema Vision India 1, no. 4 (1980): 24. 10. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limits of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3. 11. Guha, History, 94. 12. Guha, History, 92. 13. Guha, History, 92. 14. For a succinct summary of such views, see Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, “Introduction” in Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1–60. Filmmakers and critics contributed in no small measure to this impression. Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1976), 73; Kobita Sarkar, Indian Cinema Today: An Analysis (New Delhi: Sterling, 1975), 105. There are a variety of opinions on the role of the song in popular Hindi cinema. Lalitha Gopalan interprets them as “interruptions” that audiences knew to expect in the progression of the plot and narrative in Cinema of Interruptions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Ravi Vasudevan regards them as paranarrative units that contain that which is in excess of the narrative in “The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative, and Performance in the 1950s,” Screen 30, issue 3 (Summer 1989): 29–50. Most recently Aarti Wani has analyzed songs in popular Hindi films as having a “pivotal” role in “propelling the narrative.” Aarti Wani, Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema in the 1950s (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 80–132; Neepa Majumdar

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16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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analyzes the duality of aural and visual stardom in an analysis of Lata Mangeshkar: Neepa Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 173–202. Music, both instrumental and vocal, is crucial to any consideration of films as varied as Jalsaghar (The Music Room, Satyajit Ray, 1958), Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, Satyajit Ray, 1969), Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Land of the Diamond King, Satyajit Ray, 1980), Charulata (The Lonely Wife, Satyajit Ray, 1964), Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960). The next generation of art filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and M. S. Sathyu, to name just a few noted exponents of this stream of Indian cinema, also had prominent musical interludes in their films. See Siddheshwari (Mani Kaul, 1989), Ghashiram Kotwal (Yukt Collective, 1976), and Garam Hawa (Hot Winds, M. S. Sathyu, 1973). Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 179. Jaikumar’s remarks are in the context of Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas, 1973). Ghatak’s last film, Jukti Takko aar Gappo (1974) is also replete with mythic archetypes, especially in the character of Bangabala. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2017; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Ian Baucom, History 4° Celsius (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). For a different understanding of planetarity, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Manishita Dass, “Unsettling Images: Cinematic Theatricality in the Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak,” Screen 58, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 85. Dass, “Unsettling Images,” 85. Dass, “Unsettling Images,” 86. “I Am Not in Love with Film,” interview, in Cinema and I, trans. Dr. Chika Ghosh (Kolkata: Dhyanbindu, 2015), 187. Originally published in Chitrabikshan (Aug.–Sept. 1973). Cited in Surama Ghatak, Ritwik (Calcutta: Anustup, 2003), 28. Ritwik Ghatak, “My Coming Into Cinema,” in Cinema and I, trans. Dr. Chika Ghosh (Kolkata: Dhyanbindu, 2015), 33. See Sumanta Banerjee, “In Lieu of an Introduction,” in Ritwik Ghatak, Stories, trans. Rani Ray (Calcutta: Srishti, 2001), xvi, note 12. Ritwik Ghatak, “Cinema and the Subjective Factor,” in Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000), 37. Ghatak, “I Am Not in Love with Film,” 187. Ritwik Ghatak, “Two Aspects of Cinema,” in Cinema and I, 40–41. Ritwik Ghatak, “Interviews,” in Rows and Rows of Fences, 94. The 26-line poem appeared in the collection Punascha. See Rabindraracanabali 3 (Calcutta: Viswabharati, 1961), 26. Moinak Biswas, “Two Articles by Ritwik Ghatak,” Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 12. Prominent ragas featuring the flattened third note are Bhairavi, Todi, Ashavari, Bageshri, Darbari-Kannada, and Pilu. I am grateful to Ronit Ghosh for his discussion of the flattened third with me. Ghosh noted that since the predominant mood of a certain musical passage not only depends on musical notes but also tempo (laya), rhythm, scale pattern, mode of singing, the kinds of instrumental accompaniment used, and so on, there are innumerable instances where komal ga has been used within an optimistic/happy context. However, if we have to think of the default and

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predominant mood associated with that note, it would be sadness and pathos—both in Indian and Western music. 31. I Have Named (Her) Komal Gandhar in My Mind If it entered her hearing she would probably ask, in surprise, “what does it mean?” There’s labor and its fruits in this earthly life The good, the evil, and sundry other things. With easy acquaintance she knows this and all the folk around. Sitting by her, I watch: She’s cast a melody all around. Un-selfconscious, unaware. Where her Inner Deity presides, There, at His feet, Is an incense-filled platter of deep sorrow. Clouds of smoke arise and eclipse Her smile, like the shadow Upon the moon. In her voice, the mistiness of a strange compassion. She is unaware that the same strain binds the strings of her life’s tanpura, Yet, in daily chores she always strikes the Bhairavi, I cannot fathom her cause. And so, I have named her Komal Gandhar— It is hard to comprehend why Teardrops glide into the heart When she lifts her eyes. (I am grateful to Supurna Dasgupta for her help with the translation.)

32. Tagore, reminisced Ghatak, remarked to the younger poet Bishnu Dey when they met in Barackpore, a small town in the outskirts of Calcutta, that his eyes reminded him of komal gandhar. Ghatak, “Komal Gandhar Prashange Prarichalaker Baktabya” [The director’s statement on Komal Gandhar], Ritwik Ghatak and Komal Gandhar Special Issue, Chitrabhaash, nos. 45–46–47 (2013): 76. 33. Bishnu Dey, Naam Rekhechi Komal Gandhar Mone Mone (Calcutta: Signet, 1953), 127–29. 34. Ghatak, cited in “Komal Gandhar Prashange,” 76. 35. Ghatak, “Sound in Film,” Cinema Vision India 1, no. 4 (1980): 26. 36. Gandharvas in Sanskrit are celestial patrons of music, horses, and sexual love. The term “Gandharva marriage” became a euphemism in Sanskrit literature for an otherwise unsanctioned sexual union, i.e., one witnessed only by these celestial beings. For more details, see Vatsyayana Mallanaga, Kamasutra, trans. and ed. Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93. 37. Ritwik Ghatak, “Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts” in Chalachitra, Manush, ebong aro Kichu (1975; Kolkata: Dey’s, 2013), 151. Translation mine. “Tagore” is an anglicization of the Bengali surname “Thakur.” 38. “Shakuntala,” Prachin Sahitya, Rabindraracanabali, vol. 13 (Calcutta: Vishwabharati, 1961), 662 (17)–622 (29).

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39. The island in Tempest, according to Tagore, remained external to Miranda’s personality. Its mountains and seas did not mold her temper and spirit. Shakuntala, by contrast, was formed by the tapovan. The birds, deer, plants, and creepers of the forest retained their individuality and Shakuntala flourished in their midst, developing a deep intimacy with the natural life around her, absorbing its rhythms and cadence. Humans in the Tempest, Prospero and Miranda, by contrast, were superior to nature. Ariel, depicted as a natural creature in human form, never elicited their love. When they departed from the island, it was without a word of farewell to Ariel, who remained a reluctant servant throughout the play. Shakuntala and the forest remained sovereign entities; their deep union occurred without their respective singularities being compromised. 40. The Recognition of Shakuntala by Kalidasa, ed. and trans. Somadeva Vasudeva (New York: Clay Sanskrit Library, 2006), 15. 41. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 233–54. 42. Ritwik Ghatak, “Human Society,” 17. 43. Ghatak, OS, 19–20. 44. Ghatak, OS, 18. 45. James Chandler, “The Question of Sensibility,” New Literary History 49, no. 4 (Autumn 2018): 475–78. Chandler traces the development and reemergence of “sensibility” through his close historical readings of Wordsworth, Adam Smith, and Erasmus Darwin before linking these discussions in a series that lead up to the British empiricist tradition and Gayatri Spivak’s call for aesthetic education, mediated through her reading (“ab-use”) of Wordsworth in the era of globalization. 46. Ghatak, “Subarnarekha Prasange” in Chalachitra, Manush, ebong aro Kichu, 153. 47. Heidegger wrote, “[W]hat constitutes homecoming is that the countrymen must first become at home in the still withheld essence of their homeland—indeed, even prior to this, that the ‘dear ones’ at home must first learn how to become at home. For this it is necessary to know in advance what is the homeland’s specific nature and what is best in it. But how should we ever find this, unless a seeker is there for us, and the sought-for essence of the homeland shows itself to him?” See Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity, 2000), 33. 48. Unlike the bulk of his composition, this poem was first written in English and subsequently translated into Bengali. A passion play that Tagore saw in Oberammergau, a small town in the Bavarian Alps, inspired the poem. Amiya Chakravarty, a poet himself and Tagore’s secretary who traveled with him, recorded that the German film company UFA wanted a script from him for a pageant on Indian life. 49. For critical appreciation of the poem, see Abu Sayeed Ayyub, Modernism and Tagore (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995), 118. 50. Times Literary Supplement, Feb 18, 1932, 115, cited in Shailesh Parekh, The Child: A Poem in English by Rabindranath Tagore, https://www.academia.edu/14840992/The _Child__A_Poem_in_English_by_Rabindranath_Tagore. Also see Kalyan Kundu, Sakti Bhattacharya, and Kalyan Sircar, eds., Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath and the British Press (1912–1941) (Calcutta: Shishu Sahitya Samsad, 2000). 51. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150. 52. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 166–67. 53. Chidananda Dasgupta, “Cinema, Marxism, and the Mother Goddess,” India International Center Quarterly 12, no. 3 (September 1985): 250.

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54. Dasgupta, “Cinema, Marxism,” 259. 55. Also see Ghatak’s essay “Two Aspects of Cinema” for a description of his use of particular lenses and camera angles. Ghatak, “Two Aspects of Cinema,” in Cinema and I, 48–54. 56. Dasgupta, “Cinema, Marxism,” 258. 57. Chidananda Dasgupta, The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (Delhi: Roli, 1991), x. 58. Dasgupta, Painted Face, xi. 59. Dasgupta, Painted Face, 60. 60. Dasgupta, Painted Face, 65. 61. Dasgupta, Painted Face, 65–66. 62. Rochona Majumdar, “Song-Time, the Time of Narratives, and the Changing Idea of Nation in Post-Independence Cinema,” Boundary 2 (forthcoming). 63. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “In Defense of Provincializing Europe: A Response to Carola Dietze,” History and Theory 47 (February 2008): 89–90. 64. Richard Dyer has made an influential argument about the utopian nature of song and dance in Hollywood musicals. See Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 2002), 19–36. 65. Dudley Andrew, “Reverberations of Discord and Harmony in the Key of E-Flat,” (unpublished manuscript). 66. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments (New York: Norton, 2019), 4. 67. A baul is a syncretic, religious itinerant, and a vast repertoire of music is associated with the baul tradition in Bengal. For a cultural history of bauls, see Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking Bauls of Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 68. Ritwik Ghatak, “Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts,” trans. Moinak Biswas, Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 13. 69. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 13. 70. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 13. 71. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 14. 72. Campbell cited in Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 14. 73. Biswas, “Two Articles by Ritwik Ghatak,” 12–13. 74. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 15. 75. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 15. 76. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 15. 77. Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 16. 78. Rachel McDermott, Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4. 79. McDermott, Mother of My Heart, 275. 80. Ritwik Ghatak, Cinema India, ed. Shampa Banerjee (New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1982), 49. Also see Debali Mookerjea Leonard, Literature, Gender and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence (New York: Routledge, 2017) for a literary analysis of middle-class women who were compelled to join the workforce postpartition. 81. See Susmita Som, “Itihaser Prekkhite Banglar Loukik Chhora” [Bengali folk poems in a historical context] (PhD diss., University of North Bengal, 2010), accessed on November  21, 2020, https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/ bitstream/10603/169017/7/07 _chapter_03.pdf, 137. Som cites R. C. Majumdar, Bangladeshera Itihasa, Adhunik Yuga (1957), 346. Also see Sureshchandra Bandyopadhyay, Smritisastre Bangali (Calcutta: A. Mukherjee, 1960), 53. 82. Ghatak, Cinema India, 50. 83. Ghatak, “My Thoughts on Cinema,” in Cinema and I, 87.

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84. Moinak Biswas, in Ghatak, “Human Society,” trans. Moinak Biswas, 16n8. 85. For a critical discussion of the problems inherent in the ways in which a secular subject like history interprets practices having to do with gods, spirits, or the supernatural as agentive forces in the world, see Chakrabarty, “Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History,” in Provincializing Europe, 72–96. 86. I am grateful to Dan Morgan for drawing my attention to this aspect of the song. Michel Chion, Film: A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 249–52. 87. I am grateful to Supurna Dasgupta for her help in translating this song. 88. This understanding of jouissance is drawn from Lee Edelman’s reading of Jacques Lacan. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 25. 89. The essay was first presented at a roundtable discussion on “Critica e nuovo cinema” during the First Mostra Internazionale di Nuovo Cinema at Pesaro, Italy, May 31, 1965. For more detail, see P. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5–6. 90. Dudley Andrew, “Reverberations of Discord and Harmony in the Key of E-Flat” (unpublished manuscript). Andrew cites Sushmita Banerji’s doctoral dissertation as crucial for his view on Ghatak, Pasolini, and the cinema of poetry. See Banerji, “A Cinema of Partitioned Subjects: Ritwik Ghatak, 1960–1974” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2014). 91. Sitney, Cinema of Poetry, 6. 92. Here is Pasolini’s explanation of the device: “the fundamental characteristic of the ‘free indirect point-of-view shot’ is not linguistic but stylistic. And it can therefore be defined as an interior monologue lacking both the explicit conceptual elements and the explicit abstract philosophical element. . . . In fact, it causes it to free the expressive possibilities compressed by the traditional narrative convention through a return to the origins until the original oneiric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary quality of cinema is found through its technical devices.” Cited in Sitney, Cinema of Poetry, 23. 93. Pasolini cited in Sitney, Cinema of Poetry, 21. 94. Ghatak, “Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach,” in Cinema and I, 64. 95. Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay, “Meghe Dhaka Tara,” Thakurmar Jhuli (Kolkata: Ananda, 2000), 61. I am grateful to Ballari Sen- Choudhury for bringing these poems to my attention and for discussing them with me. 96. Yojana is a measure of space. A single yojana is 12–15 kilometers. 97. Biswas, “Her Mother’s Son.” 98. This is a slight rewording of Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019). Keeling points to horizons of revolutionary desire in the context of discussions on Afrofuturism. Arundhati Roy writes evocatively about love-laws in the forbidden relationships between different characters in her novel The God of Small Things (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 328.

5. “Anger and After” The title is drawn from a chapter that contains responses primarily by film society members to Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, particularly Calcutta 71 and Padatik, in a book published by the Cine Club of Calcutta. See Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Clube of Calcutta, 1992), 74–99.

5. “Anger and After” 267 1. Contemporary commentators argued that the trilogy belonged to the middle phase in Sen’s career. Akash Kusum (Up in the Clouds, 1965) marked the beginning of this phase and Chorus (1974) its end. The films from this phase made Sen one of the most controversial directors in Bengal. For a discussion of the different phases in Sen’s work, see Someswar Bhowmik, “Mrinal Senera Shilpera Dhara,” Chitradarpan, year 1, no. 2 (April–May, 1980), 30–39. 2. For a general sense of some of the issues raised in discussions of political cinema, see Nityapriya Ghosh, “Political Cinema,” Indian Film Culture 10, no. 1 (1982): 1–6; Sumanta Bandyopadhyay, “Bangla Chalachitre Rajniti,” Chitrapat 11 (1980): 19–25; Lalit Mohan Joshi, ed., South Asian Cinema: Leftist Thought in Indian Cinema (London: South Asian Cinema Foundation, 2008), Iqbal Masud, “Indian Political Cinema: Is It Necessary?,” Indian Film Culture, no. 9 (Winter 1979): 12–14. 3. Craig Jeffrey’s study of unemployed Jat youth and surplus time finds they significantly shape discourses of political democracy in India. Craig Jeffrey, Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 4. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006). 5. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 13. See also “Bombay Boys: Dissolving the Male Child in Popular Hindi Cinema,” in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 350–76; Ashis Nandy, “Indian Cinema as the Slum’s Eye View of Politics,” in The Secret Politics of our Desires, ed. Ashis Nandy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiii, xiv. 7. Chitrabhaash, Calcutta 71 special number (1972): 54. This interview originally appeared in Masik Bangladesh, year 1, no. 7. In numerous interviews and articles he wrote at the time, Sen also talked about being moved by currents in Latin American and African cinema. For a discussion of Sen’s writings and specifically his references to Latin American cinema, see Rajat Ray, “Mrinal Senera Chalachitra Bhabna,” Chitradarpan 1, no. 2 (April–May, 1980): 47–50. For comments on Latin American directors Solanas, Glezier, Rocha, Littín, and Álvarez—some of whom he met—see “Cinema Par Excellence” in Mrinal Sen, Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema (Kolkata: Seagull, 2002), 288–94. 8. For instance, during the filming of Interview, he was told by Nemai Ghosh, the photographer of Ray’s film, about the shooting of the scene in The Adversary when the protagonist asked about the greatest event of the decade responded saying “the war in Vietnam.” “I said to myself,” recalled Sen “that the fellow should have been hired there and then because he would have been an excellent worker. . . . Anyway I made a pact with Nemai that he would not say anything to Manik-babu [Ray].” He went on to insert a question to the protagonist in Interview: “What is the biggest event of the day?” to which the interviewee replied “‘My interview’ and gets up chuckling heartily” and took his leave with a “see you soon.” Sen, “Interview, 2001,” in Montage, 56. 9. Supriya Chaudhuri, “In the City,” in Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema, ed. Moinak Biswas (Calcutta: Seagull, 2006), 251. 10. Chaudhuri, “In the City,” 260. 11. As if to jog our memory, there is a quick shot from Pather Panchali of the scene where Sarbajaya, played by Bandyopadhyay, informs Harihar of Durga’s death.

268 5. “Anger and After” 12. Some of these details included information that his sister was married a year ago but had to return home to live with them as her husband was an unkind and unfaithful man. Or that his job in the press included everything from collecting advertisement revenue to proofreading. 13. The charge of gimmickry came after Akash Kusum (1965) and continued through the trilogy. In a paper delivered in Bangalore, Sen stated that for Interview he considered “introducing a card in my credits, reading “Screenplay, Direction & Gimmicks by Mrinal Sen.” Mrinal Sen, “An Uncertain Journey,” in Montage, 100. 14. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71,” Chitrabikshan, 62. 15. For example, see Ashok Rudra’s piece in Sakti Basu and Shuvendu Dasgupta, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 69. The article originally appeared in Frontier. Also Mrigankasekhar Roy, “Calcutta 71” in Chitrapat Samkalan 1 (A Selection of Essays and Reviews Published in Chitrapat, Issues 1–14), ed. Pradiptashankar Sen, Samik Bandyopadhyay, Surya Bandyopadhyay, and Anil Kumar Das (Kolkata: Calcutta Film Society, 2007), 169–76. 16. For historical details on this period, particularly the Naxalite movement, see S. P. Aiyar, ed., The Politics of Mass Violence in India (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1967); Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); P. C. Joshi, Naxalism at a Glance (New Delhi: Kalpaz, 2012); Sumanta Banerjee, India’s Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising (London: Zed, 1980). 17. Former police chief Ranjit Gupta writes about combatting the Maoists using armed force and intelligence sources. See Gupta, The Crimson Agenda: Maoist Protest and Terror (New Delhi: Wordsmith, 2004). 18. Inder Malhotra, “Foreword,” in Ranjit Gupta, The Crimson Agenda (New Delhi, Wordsmith, 2004), 9. 19. Ranajit Guha, “On Torture and Culture,” in The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009), 560–76. 20. A collection of newspaper and journal articles from this period that gives a comprehensive account of contemporary views is Amalendu Sengupta, Jowar Bhatay Shaat Shottor (Calcutta: Pearl, 1997). 21. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71,” Chitrabikshan, 62. 22. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71,” Chitrabikshan, 62. 23. This and all subsequent translations from Calcutta 71 are mine. 24. Existing copies of the film have excised this sequence. Every report of the film from the time of its release, however, makes reference to it. As an example, see Samik Bandyopadhyay, “Calcutta 71,” in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 66. I have watched this sequence in a copy given to me by Sen’s son, Kunal Sen. 25. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71,” Chitrabikshan, 64. 26. All three had at some point in their lives identified with communism. Their literary endeavors addressed themes of poverty (seen through the lens of the famine of 1943), the plight of refugees, intergenerational conflicts, and youth. 27. Sen, “A Terrible Dearth of Dreams and Dreamers,” in Montage, 113. This essay first appeared in Bengali as “Itihaser Asraye.” 28. For an account of photography and art of the famine, see Ranu Roychoudhuri, “Documentary Photography, Decolonization, and the Making of ‘Secular Icons’: Reading Sunil Janah’s Photographs from the 1940s Through the 1950s,” Bioscope 8, no. 1 (2017): 46–80; Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Hungry Bengal, A Tour Through Midnapore District, 1943 (New Delhi: Delhi Art Gallery, 2011); Tanushree Ghosh, “Witnessing

5. “Anger and After” 269

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Famine: The Testimonial Work of Famine Photographs and Anti-Colonial Spectatorship,” Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 3 (2019): 327–57; Atrayee Gupta, “Developmental Aesthetics,” in Water Histories of South Asia, ed. Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati (London: Routledge, 2020), 185–208. Sen, “Interview, 1971,” in Montage, 125. “Interview with Mrinal Sen, Prasanga, Calcutta 71,” Chitrabikshan, 64. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 109. For historical accounts of the famine, see Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War (New York: Basic, 2010); Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015). Sen, “Interview, 1971,” 125. Sen, “Interview, 1971,” 125–27. Biographical and historical accounts of the period tell us that thousands of young boys aged 10–12 and upward, from starving families, took to the streets during the food riots of 1966. There were memorial services for the “martyrs” in these riots. See Sengupta, Jowar Bhatay Shaat Shottor, 196–200. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71” in Chitrabikshan, 65. Sen, “Cinema, the Growing Phenomenon,” in Views on Cinema (Calcutta: Ishan, 1977), 9. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71” in Chitrabikshan, 66. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71” in Chitrabikshan, 66. Sen suggested this reading in the aforementioned interview. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71” in Chitrabikshan, 66. “Calcutta 71,” Desh (October 28, 1972), reprinted in Chitrabhaash, Calcutta 71 special number (1972): 44–45; Kalpataru Sengupta, “Calcutta 71: Chalachitra Jagat e Ekti Nirbhik Prachesta” [Calcutta 71: A fearless attempt in the world of cinema], Bangladesh, reprinted in Chitrabhaash, Calcutta 71 special number (1972): 31; Nicotinus, untitled article reprinted in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 73. Other journals—Nandan, Aneek, Satyajug, Antarjatik Angik, Purbataranga—applauded Calcutta 71 as a politically committed film. “Calcutta 71: A Film for Social Betterment,” Economic Times, January 7, 1973. Reprinted in CB, 38. “Calcutta 71: A Film for Social Betterment,” 38. “Calcutta 71: A Film for Social Betterment,” 38. Satyadev Dubey is a theater actor and screenwriter who wrote some of the screenplays for Shyam Benegal’s films. N. K. G., “The Importance of Being Mrinal Sen,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, October 27, 1972, reprinted in CB, 35. Roy, Chitrapat Samkalan 1, 169–76. Ashok Rudra, in an untitled article reprinted in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 70. Rudra, untitled, Film Polemics, 70–71. Rudra, untitled, Film Polemics, 71. Rudra, untitled, Film Polemics, 72. Nicotinus, untitled, Film Polemics, 72. For an analysis of what such debates tell us about the nature of the category “political,” see Prathama Banerjee, Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

270 5. “Anger and After” 53. Dipendu Chakrabarty, “Kolkata 71 er Marksio Bichar” [A Marxist appraisal of Calcutta 71] and Shuvendu Dasgupta, “Pratibaadi Chalachitra Samparkito Koyekti Dharona Proshonge Ekti Patra” [A letter about revolutionary cinema], Movie Montage, no. 13 (October 1972): 41–49, 51–69. See also Dipendu Chakrabarty, “Calcutta 71 Ekjon Sadhanran Darshakera Chokhe” [Calcutta 71 through the eyes of an ordinary viewer], reprinted in Chalachitre Bitarka [Debates in cinema], ed. Sakti Basu and Shuvendu Dasgupta (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 145–51. 54. For a reference to this, see Sen, “Interview, 2001,” 47. For an analysis of revolutionary Bengali poetry, see Rajarshi Dasgupta, “Rhyming Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal,” Studies in History 21, no. 1 (2005): 79–98. On Jibanananda Das, see Clinton Seely, A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of Poet Jibanananda Das (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). 55. Chakrabarty, “Calcutta 71 Ekjon Sadhanran Darshakera Chokhe,” 148. 56. See articles by Shuvendu Dasgupta, Shaktiprosad Sengupta, and others in Chalachitre Bitarka [Debates in cinema], ed. Sakti Basu and Shuvendu Dasgupta (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 120–200. Some of the titles express their critical stance. For example, “Calcutta 71: The Mistaken Artistic Representation of an Idea”; “Garibi Hatao Banam Calcutta 71” (Garibi Hatao versus Calcutta 71); and “Mrinal Sen er Who Dun It” [Mrinal Sen’s whodunnit]. 57. Sen, “Interview, 2001,” 53–54. Ashish Rajadhyaksha refers to these moments in the film as “textual excess.” Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 252–53. 58. Sen, “Interview, 2001,” 53. 59. Sen, “Interview, 2001,” 54. 60. “Interview with Mrinal Sen: Calcutta 71,” Chitrabikshan, 62–63. 61. Sen, “Interview, 1971,” 127. 62. Sen, “Interview, 1971,” 127. 63. Frontier, a left-leaning journal started in 1968 featured in the film, carried several articles both sympathetic to and fiercely critical of Padatik’s ideological orientation, its seemingly incongruous plotline, and its denouement. For a collection of these, see Film Polemics, 74–99. Film society journals too were vocal about this last installment of the trilogy. For a positive essay on the film, see Basab Dasgupta, “Padatik: Byaktigata Pratikriya” [Padatik: personal reactions], Chitrabikshan, year 2, no.  1–2 (1973): 38–41, Samik Bandyopadhyay, “Padatik,” Chitradarpan, Mrinal Sen special issue, year 1, no. 2 (April–May 1980): 44–46. 64. Sen, “Interview, 1971,” 127. 65. Sen, “Interview: 1980,” in Montage, 155. 66. The sequence itself has the feel of a television interview. Shila, shown in medium closeup, informs the audience that she is conducting an “attitude survey” with her colleagues to understand the impact of the manifold social changes that have taken place over the past decades on gender relations. Interviewer and interviewee do not appear in the same frame. There are either shots of Shila listening attentively to the respondents as a recorder taped their words, or those of the interviewees answering Shila’s questions with only the head of her microphone protruding from the bottom of the frame. 67. See Sengupta, Jowar Bhatay Shaat Shottor. 68. Indeed, Sen is called a “revisionist” for the views articulated in Padatik. See comment by Sreemati Gupta in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 87.

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69. See the wealth of commentary that has arisen around Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 49, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99. 70. Ashok Rudra, “In Defence of Padatik,” in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 98. Originally published in Frontier 6, no. 36 (1973). 71. Rudra, “In Defence of Padatik,” 97. 72. Aveek Majumdar (Howrah), untitled letter, in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 83. 73. Letter by “A Filmgoer” in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 79. Sen wrote a fiery rejoinder to this letter. 74. For a discussion of sentiment as a “relay of regard” rather than as “vehement passions,” see James Chandler, An Archeology of Sympathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 11–12. 75. “A Filmgoer”; “What Came After Anger”; both in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 79. 76. Sen, “Interview, 2001,” 59. 77. This was a statement by Ashish Rajadhyaksha that Sen recalled in the interview. Sen, “Interview, 2001,” 59. 78. See Andrew Robinson’s discussion of Ashani Sanket in Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 221–22. Also see Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–44 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 79. Sen cited in Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, 230. 80. Sen, “A Terrible Dearth of Dreams and Dreamers,” 115–16. 81. Sen, “A Terrible Dearth of Dreams and Dreamers,” 114. 82. Sen, “A Terrible Dearth of Dreams and Dreamers,” 113. 83. Sen, “A Terrible Dearth of Dreams and Dreamers,” 115. 84. Sen, “Interview, 1971,” 125.

6. The Untimely Filmmaker 1. The Middleman released in theaters on February 20, 1976. It received the censor certificate the previous year and was also the recipient of the national award for best direction for films made in 1975. Accordingly, I have dated it as a 1975 film. 2. The sense of movement through time resembles Reinhart Koselleck’s discussion of the relationship of the past to the future. In the Neue Zeit, the two main features of future consciousness were the “increasing speed with which it approaches us, and second, its unknown quality.” Ray’s early films, for all their famed slowness, encapsulated this sense of the future. Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 9–25. 3. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 110. 4. Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 34. 5. Mrinal Sen, “Ekti Byaktigata Chithi” [A personal letter], in Satyajit: Jiban ar Silpa [Satyajit: Life and art], ed. Subrata Rudra (Kolkata: Pratibhaas, 2011), 223. The essay

272

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

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was written to celebrate Ray’s birthday on May 2. As it happened, Ray died a few days before his seventy-first birthday on April 23rd, 1992. Sen, “Ekti Byaktigata Chithi,” 224. David Flaherty cited in Chandak Sengoopta, “The Universal Film for All of Us Everywhere in the World,” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 29, no. 3 (2009): 282. “Dialogue on Film: Satyajit Ray,” interview with the American Film Institute, 1978, in Bert Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 90. Geeta Kapur, “Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (1993): 17–49; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Satyajit Ray, Ray’s Films, and the Ray-Movie,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (1993): 7–16. For a refutation of the views presented by Kapur and Rajadhyaksha, see Sourin Bhattacharya, “Develop-Mentalist Turn: Recovering Ray’s Panchali” and Moinak Biswas, “Early Films: The Novel and Other Horizons,” in Apu and After, ed. Moinak Biswas (Kolkata: Seagull, 2001), 19–36, 37–79; Sharmistha Gooptu, “Satyajit Ray and Bengali Cinema,” in Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (New Delhi: Roli, 2010), 212–53; Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 1–31. While Biswas, Bhattacharya, and Gooptu analyze Ray within the context of Bengali cinema, Ganguly analyzes Ray as part of a global modernist avant-garde. Ravi Vasudevan, “Dislocations: The Cinematic Imaginings of a New Society in 1950s India,” Oxford Literary Review 16, no. 1–2 (1994): 102–3. Biswas, “Early Films,” 52. Ravi Vasudevan, “Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism,” in Apu and After, ed. Moinak Biswas (Kolkata: Seagull, 2001), 107. Biswas, “Early Films,” 52. Chandak Sengoopta, “The Fruits of Independence: Satyajit Ray, Indian Nationhood, and the Specter of Empire,” South Asian History and Culture 2, no. 3 (2011): 381. Sengoopta, “Fruits of Independence,” 382. Vasudevan, “Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism,” 107. Supriya Chaudhuri, “In the City,” in Apu and After, 253–54. For a discussion of the expectations foisted upon a realist style associated with Ray, see Biswas, “Introduction,” in Apu and After, 3–8. “Conversation with Satyajit Ray,” interview with Folke Isaksson, 1970, in Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray Interviews, 50. “Conversation with Satyajit Ray,” 50. Berlant and Stewart, The Hundreds, 109. Ray to Marie Seton, October 15, 1969, BFI Seton Papers. Letter to Seton, October 6, 1971, BFI Seton Papers. Letter to Seton cited in Andrew Robinson, The Inner Eye (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 204. Most of Pather Panchali was shot in the village of Boral, some six miles from Calcutta or what was Calcutta in the 1950s. For more details, see Andrew Robinson, The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 46. Enakshi Chatterjee, ed. Sunil Gangopadhyay: A Reader (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2009), xviii. He was startled to receive a phone call from Satyajit Ray, he reminisced, requesting a meeting with him about his novel Days and Nights in the Forest, which had been

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

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published in a low-brow film magazine called Jalsa. Ganguly was also part of a group that published a small, highly influential, and irreverent poetry magazine called Krittibas. Several members of the group were also active in the Hungrealist movement, a 1960s Bengali literary movement whose mandate was to radically question and reject established norms of sexuality, family, love, and money. Ganguly and his friends (poets Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, and Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay) acquired a reputation in 1960s Kolkata as bohemians. The Krittibas group owed money to the small printing press that published the journal. It was to repay that debt that Ganguly wrote Days and Nights. Written in haste, it was not a novel he expected would catch the eye of an artistic stalwart like Satyajit Ray. Sunil Ganguly, “Kahinikarer Katha” [The author’s account], Chitrabhaash, special issue on The Adversary, vol. 44, no. 1–4 (January 2009–December 2009) and vol. 45, no. 1–2 (January 2010–June 2010): 66. Tirtha Das, “Nirbacita Chalacitre Sunil Gangopadhyay o Shankarer Sahitya” (PhD diss., Visva Bharati University, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/10603/221630, 52. Ganguly, “Kahinikarer Katha,” 66. Sankar, Swarga Marta Patal (Kolkata: Dey’s, 1993), iii. Neel Mukherjee, “Chowringhee by Sankar,” accessed on Feb 11, 2020, http://www .neelmukherjee.com/2009/12/chowringhee-by-sankar/. For a discussion on “typage” in Ray’s Apu trilogy, see Biswas, “Early Films,” 42–43. Das, “Nirbacita Chalacitre Sunil Gangopadhyay o Shankarer Sahitya,” 292–93. Books on Indian cinema cite the date of Jana Aranya as 1975. The film released in several Calcutta theaters including Minar, Bijali, and Chabighar on February 20, 1976. “A Conversation with Satyajit Ray,” interview with Andrew Robinson, 1982, in Satyajit Ray: Interviews, ed. Cardullo, 145. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” interview by Christian Braad Thomsen, in Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray: Interviews, 54–55. For example, James Hadley Chase (1906–1985), a British thriller writer, is mentioned in a short story entitled “Barin Bhowmick’s Ailment,” in Satyajit Ray, Indigo, trans. Satyajit Ray and Gopa Majumdar (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000); Ellery Queen (pseudonym for cousins Frederic Dannay and Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky) features in the Feluda story Baksho Rahasya [The mystery of the box] (1972). See Rochona Majumdar, “Feluda on Feluda: A Letter to Topshe,” South Asian History and Culture 8, no. 2 (2017): 233–44. Chidananda Dasgupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray (New Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 1980), 92. Shuvendu Dasgupta, “Prasanga Jibandharmi Chalacitra” [On the subject of realist films] and “Satyajit Ray: Nijer Kathay” [Satyajit Ray in his own words] in Shuvendu Dasgupta, Chalacitra Anya Prabandha (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1991), 82–101. See entries by Dhruba Gupta and Ashok Rudra, “Rajnaitik Chabira Sangya Ki?” in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Sakti Basu, Chalachitre Bitarka (Calcutta: Cine Club of Calcutta, 1992), 247– 57. These were originally published in the Bengali journal Kalpanirjhar. Also see the Chitrabhaash special issue on The Adversary cited in note 27 above. Dasgupta, Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 94–95, emphasis mine. Sengoopta, “Fruits of Independence,” 378. Following Prathama Banerjee, I understand atmospherics as “the production of  an  atmosphere, which inheres neither in an object . . . nor in its subjective

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43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

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representation . . . but enfolds both as a borderless, nonlocalizable, sensory, and affective ambience.” See Prathama Banerjee, Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 196. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8–9. Also see recollections by Shaji Varghese, television producer-turned-builder, in K. R. Manoj’s documentary, 16mm: Memories, Movement, and a Machine (2008), for a firsthand account of the ways in which depictions of sexuality in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) impacted film society viewers in Trivandrum, Kerala. For a historical account of rivalries between the two soccer clubs, see Boria Majumdar and Kaushik Bandyopadhyay, “Ghati-Bangal on the Maidan: Subregionalism, Club Rivalry, and Fan Culture in Indian Football,” in A Social History of Indian Football: Striving to Score (London: Routledge, 2006), 92–108. Shinjini Das, “Debating Scientific Medicine: Homoeopathy and Allopathy in Late Nineteenth Century Medical Print in Bengal,” Medical History 56, no. 4 (2012): 463– 80; “Biography and Homoeopathy in Bengal: Colonial Lives of a European Heterodoxy,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 6 (2015): 1732–71. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze,” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 65–79; Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices About Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (1997): 83–113. First witnessed in considerable numbers from 1967, a gherao was described by the Calcutta High Court as follows: “Gherao is a comparatively new form of demonstration which is being resorted to by laborers in this country. Generally, it assumes the form of keeping the management or the managerial staff of the industrial and other establishments in wrongful confinement, thus depriving them of their personal and other liberties. Occasionally, it assumes the form of physical surrounding of establishments, thus shutting off access of the management thereto, thereby depriving them of the right to property. . . . Once commenced, gheraos tend to degenerate into further criminal activities, for example, wrongful restraint, trespass, mischief, annoyance, intimidation, and worse. The object of both the forms of gherao is to coerce the management and make them concede to the demands of labour.” See Nitish R. De, “Gherao as a Technique for Social Intervention,” Economic and Political Weekly 5, no. 3–4–5, Annual Number of the Seventies (January 1970): 201. There has been some recent anthropological scholarship on stray dogs and cats in Indian cities, focusing on both the danger they become for urban denizens and also the brutal culling of these animals undertaken by some municipal establishments. See Anuradha Ramanujan, “Violent Encounters: ‘Stray’ Dogs in Indian Cities,” in Cosmopolitan Animals, ed. Kaori Nagai et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 216–32. See Gunning’s discussion of John F. Kasson’s characterization of urban representation in terms of the bird’s-eye and mole’s-eye views in the context of his own analysis of late film noir in Tom Gunning, “Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir,” in Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, eds., Cinematicity in Media History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 158. See photographs by Nemai Ghosh in the collection Nemai Ghosh’s Kolkata (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2014). Ghosh worked with both Ray and Mrinal Sen. Still photographic representations in the city from the said period emphasized the feeling of unity that processions created across social groups.

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51. Teresa Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture,” Cartographic Journal 46, no. 1 (February 2009): 14. Also see Jeffrey Geiger’s discussion of the aerial view in “Cinematicity and the Aerial View,” in Geiger and Littau, eds., Cinematicity in Media History, 140–41. 52. For an account of political violence caused by infrastructural shortages and lapses from the mid-1950s onward, see Myron Weiner, “Violence and Politics in Calcutta,” Journal of Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (May 1961): 275–81; Sucharita Sengupta, Paula Banerjee, and Anwesha Sengupta, People, Politics, Protest: Calcutta and West Bengal 1950s–1960s (Kolkata: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2016). Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta: The Living City, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990) contains a wealth of information on traffic, sewage, and power crises in Calcutta from the 1960s onward. 53. Michael Mann, “Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” Archives of European Sociology 25 (1984): 185–213. 54. Cited in Sunila Kale, Electrifying India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 11. 55. I am grateful to Elizabeth Chatterjee for her insights on the power crisis in 1960s Calcutta and for this citation to K. T. Shah, ed., Power and Fuel: Report of the Sub- Committee (Bombay: Vora, 1949), 71. For a discussion of “fossil developmentalism,” see Elizabeth Chatterjee, “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (2020): 3–24. 56. Banerjee, Elementary Aspects, 198. 57. “Dialogue on Film: Satyajit Ray,” American Film Institute, 1978, in Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray Interviews, 67. 58. “The Politics of Humanism,” interview with Udayan Gupta, in Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray Interviews, 129. 59. Jyotirmoy Datta, ed., Ray in the Looking Glass: Two Interviews, His Longest and His Last (Calcutta: Badwip, 1993), 50. Emphasis mine. 60. Raymond Bellour, “Satyajit Ray, positions du probleme,” Trafic, no. 101 (March 2017). 61. An extensive collection of annotated news clippings is available in Amalendu Sengupta, Jowar Bhatay Shaat Shottor (Calcutta: Pearl, 1997). Also see Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980) for an account of the Maoist-inspired revolutionary upsurge known as the Naxalite movement. 62. Ray adapted several of Tagore’s works in his earlier films, Three Daughters and Charulata, and made a documentary on the Nobel laureate poet under the aegis of the Films Division of India on the occasion of Tagore’s birth centenary in 1961. 63. See Sudipta Kaviraj, “Tagore and Transformations in the Ideals of Love,” in The Invention of Public Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 160–88. 64. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 170–71. 65. For an analysis of “song picturization” in Indian cinema and the primacy of the aural over the visual, see Neepa Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 180–85. 66. Nusrat S. Chowdhury, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 129. 67. For a reading of Jana Aranya as a discourse on the market and the centrality of dialogue in establishing that discursive structure, see Swapan Chakravorty, “Meaning in the Middle: Dialogue and Word in Jana Aranya,” in Apu and After, 277–95. 68. “The Politics of Humanism,” interview with Udayan Gupta, 126. 69. “The Politics of Humanism,” interview with Udayan Gupta, 126.

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70. Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray, 87. 71. On the “women’s question,” see Sumit Sarkar, “The ‘Women’s Question’ in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985), 71–76. For historical analyses of the “new patriarchy,” see Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 233–54; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 72. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, in Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray Interviews, 57–58. 73. It could be that she would return to the revolutionary, he added. But this remains speculation, as the film’s narrative does not go there. It remains with her “completely disillusioned state.” “Ray’s New Trilogy,” 58. 74. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” 59. 75. Chinmay Guha, “Ekti Ghori o Sunyachari Pakha,” Saradiya Anustup, year 55, no. 1 (2020): 500. 76. Sunil Ganguly, The Adversary, trans. Enakshi Chatterjee (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1974), 127. 77. Dasgupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 107–8. 78. Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray, 156–57. 79. M. Shamim, “Of East and West,” Brochure of the Sixth International Film Festival of India, New Delhi (January 3–6, 1977): 4. Another opened as follows: “A reviewer of Indian films must have two sets of standards: one for Satyajit Ray and the other for all the rest.” Cited in “Ray’s Impeccable Artefact,” in Shuvendu Dasgupta and Shakti Basu, eds., Film Polemics (Calcutta: Cine Clube of Calcutta, 1992), 52. Also see the recent documentary on the radical journalist and poet Saroj Dutta: SD: Saroj Dutta and His Times (Kasturi Basu and Mitali Biswas, 2018). 80. That producers were reluctant to provide funds for subtitles limited Bengali films’ circulation. Interview with American Film Institute, in Cardullo, ed., Satyajit Ray Interviews, 86–87. 81. Interview with American Film Institute, 87. 82. Mrinal Sen, “Ray Sets the Example,” in Montage, A Special Issue on Satyajit Ray, 5–6 (1966). 83. Dhruba Gupta, “Post Pather Panchali Bengali Cinema,” Indian Film Culture, no. 10 (1981): 12. 84. Biswas, “Introduction,” in Apu and After, 4. 85. Nityapriya Ghosh, “Political Cinema,” Indian Film Culture 10 (1981): 2. 86. Ghosh, “Political Cinema,” 3. 87. Jonathan Buchsbaum, “A Closer Look at Third Cinema,” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 21, no. 2 (2001): 158. Also see Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael Chanan (London: BFI and Channel Four, 1983), 17–27. 88. Ghosh, “Political Cinema,” 3. 89. Sumit Sarkar, “The Radicalism of Intellectuals,” in Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns (Albany: SUNY Press), 101.

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90. Sarkar, “Radicalism of Intellectuals,” 104. Similar sentiments animated the writings of the Subaltern Studies collective. See Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37–44. 91. Chidananda Dasgupta, “Ray and Tagore,” Monthly Film Bulletin 36, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 31. 92. Chidananda Dasgupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray (New Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 1980), 86. 93. Dasgupta, “Ray and Tagore,” 34. 94. Dasgupta, “Ray and Tagore,” 31. 95. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” Interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, 54. 96. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” 54. 97. Datta, Ray in the Looking Glass, 52. Words in parenthesis in the original. 98. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 7, 217–21. 99. “The Politics of Humanism,” interview with Udayan Gupta, 127. 100. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, 59. 101. “Ray’s New Trilogy,” 59. 102. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 57–124.

Epilogue 1. Sangita Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 8. 2. C. S. Lakshmi, “Quiet Take-Over of NFDC,” Economic and Political Weekly (May 31, 1980): 957. 3. Lakshmi, “Quiet Take-Over,” 957. 4. Lakshmi, “Quiet Take-Over,” 958. 5. Lakshmi, “Quiet Take-Over,” 958. 6. See details of the history and reception of this film in Shama Zaidi, “After Mahatma What? State Aid, Institutional Finance and the Gandhi Film,” Cinema Vision India 1, no. 3 (1980): 21–22; Rachel Dwyer, “The Case of the Missing Mahatma: Gandhi and the Hindi Cinema,” Public Culture 23, no. 2 (2011): 349–76. 7. Dwyer, “Case of the Missing Mahatma,” 359. 8. Dwyer, “Case of the Missing Mahatma,” 365. 9. Dwyer, “Case of the Missing Mahatma,” 366. 10. Salman Rushdie, cited in Dwyer, “Case of the Missing Mahatma,” 366. Also see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Gandhiana and Gandhiology,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 3 (April–June 1983): 33–42. 11. Gopal, Conjugations, 9. 12. Nalin Mehta, India on Television (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008). 13. Madhu Jain, “Doordarshan Out to Shed Its Frumpy Home-Movie Image, to Produce Commercial Films,” India Today, August 31, 1989, https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine /society-the-arts/media /story/19890831-doordarshan-out-to-shed-its-frumpy-home -movie-image-to-produce-commercial-films-816454-1989-08-31. 14. Marie Seton, “Problems of Filmmaking in India,” India International Center Quarterly 2, no. 2 (April 1975): 142. The text was a lecture delivered at the Center on March 10, 1975.

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15. There are a number of works that focus on these shifts. Sangita Gopal, Conjugations; Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 233–87; Aswin Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Amit Rai, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 51– 68; Usha Iyer, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 179–208. 16. See Shweta Kishore, “Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema of Resistance,” in Activist Film Festivals, ed. Socia Tascon and Tyson Wils (Bristol: Intellect, 2016), 259–79; “Beyond Cinephilia: Situating the Encounter Between Documentary Film and Film Festival,” Third Text 27, no.  6 (2013): 735–47. 17. Aparna Sharma, “India’s Experience with the Multiplex,” Seminar (May 2003), https:// www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20aparna%20sharma.htm. 18. Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill, The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure (London: Routledge Contemporary South Asia, 2010), 182. 19. See Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 223. 20. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class, 193. 21. Her discussion of Ghosh’s Chokher Bali (Sand in the Eye, 2003) is instructive in illustrating the complex reorientation of Bengali cinema in a globalizing marketplace. Gopal, Conjugations, 155–85. 22. Film Companion, “Film Companion Adda with Bong Directors: Dibakar Banerjee, Pradeep Sarkar, Sujoy Ghosh,” Film Companion, April 20, 2015, Youtube video, 28:43, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktaIj6DZNVk. 23. For a history of adda, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 180–213. 24. Abhija Ghosh, “Memories of Action: Tracing Film Society Cinephilia in India,” BioScope 9, no. 2 (2018): 141. 25. Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 17. 26. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin, 1964), 11. 27. Carr, What Is History?, 30. 28. Ruth Beale, Lindgren and Langlois: The Archive Paradox (London: Arts Council, 2011), 14. This of course evokes Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. 29. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 30. Wendy Chun, “Net-munity, or the Space Between Us Will Open the Future,” In the Moment, May 20, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/net-munity-or-the -space-between-us-will-open-the-future/. 31. Debjani Ganguly, “The Radical Middle,” lecture delivered at Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Dublin, June 22, 2019. 32. For an elaboration of the idea of “postcolonial assemblage,” see Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, second edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 177–85. There is exciting new archival research being carried out on Ray and Sen. The Ray Society has been renamed as Society for the Preservation of

Epilogue

33. 34. 35.

36.

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Satyajit Ray Archives. Under the guidance of filmmaker Sandip Ray, Riddhi Goswami, Pinaki De, Souradip Ray, and Partha Das in Kolkata, the society is in the process of organizing a huge corpus of Ray’s graphic work, logos, journals, and letters. Mrinal Sen’s papers and personal effects will soon become a part of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, thanks to a gift from his son, Kunal Sen. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2020), 22. Latour and Weibel, eds., Critical Zones, 22. Also see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. See Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2019): 1–31. Ian Baucom, History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 32.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archives and Collections Bangiya Sahitya Parishad (Kolkata) British Film Institute (London) Calcutta Film Society (Kolkata) Center for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata) Federation of Film Societies (Kolkata) Gopal Dutia, personal collection (Mumbai) Jadavpur University Media Lab (Kolkata) Nandan Archives (Kolkata) National Archives of India (Delhi) National Film Archives of India (Pune) National Library, India (Kolkata) Rita Roy Memorial Library, Chitrabani (Kolkata) Sandip Ray, personal collection (Kolkata) Suchitra Film Society (Bangalore)

Periodicals (Including Film Society Journals) Anustup (Bengali, Kolkata) Anya Artha (Bengali, Kolkata) Anandalok (Bengali, Kolkata) Aseema (English, Bangalore) Bhashaposini (Malayalam, Kerala) Chalachitra (Bengali, Kolkata) Chitrabhaash (Bengali, Kolkata)

282

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Chitrabhabna (Bengali, Kolkata) Chitrabikshan (Bengali, Kolkata) Annual number 1975 is in English. Chitrakalpa (Bengali, Kolkata) Chitralekha Film Souvenir. Published on the occasion of the stone laying ceremony of the Chitralekha Film Studio, n.d. (English, Trivandrum) Chitrapat (Bengali, Kolkata) Chitrasamskriti, Souvenir of Ninasam Chitrasamaj (Kannada) Cine News (English, Calcutta) Cine Scene (English, Naihati, West Bengal) Cinema Vision India (English, Bombay) Cinemaya: the Asian Film Quarterly (English, Delhi) Cinewave (English, Calcutta) Close Look Chalachitra Magazine (English, Kerala) Close-Up (English, Bombay) Desh (Bengali, Kolkata) F (Bengali, Kolkata) Film (Bengali, Kolkata) Filmikon (English, Delhi) Filmfare (English, Bombay) Film Sense (English, Calcutta) IFSON (Indian Film Society News, English, Bombay (W) Kolkata (E)) Indian Film Culture (English, Calcutta) Journal of the Bengal Motion pictures Association (English, Calcutta) Journal of the Film Industry (English) Kalpanirjhar (Bengali, Kolkata) Kino (Bengali, Kolkata) Montage (English, Bombay) Movement (English, Bombay) Movie Montage (Bengali, Kolkata) Parichay (Bengali, Kolkata) Screen (English, Bombay) Souvenir of Vijayawada Film Society, 1983 (English, Vijaywada) Suchitra (Bilingual in Kannada and English, Bangalore)

Other Published Works Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. All India Progressive Writers’ Association. Manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association. In Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, vol. 1, 1936–1947, edited by Sudhi Pradhan, 7–8. Calcutta: Mrs. Santi Pradhan, 1979. Andrew, Dudley. Film in the Aura of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Andrew, Dudley, and Herve Joubert-Laurencin, eds. Opening Bazin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Athique, Adrian, and Douglas Hill. The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure. New York: Routledge Contemporary South Asia, 2010.

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283

Attwood, Bain, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Claudio Lomnitz, eds. “The Public Life of History.” Special issue of Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008). Ayyub, Abu Sayyed. Modernism and Tagore. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995. Baecque, Antoine de. Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Banaphool. “Bhuvan Shome.” In Wildfire and Other Stories, trans. Somnath Zutshi, 145–220. Calcutta: Seagull, 1999. Bandyopadhyay, Samik, ed. Indian Cinema: Contemporary Perceptions from the Thirties. Jamshedpur: Celluloid Chapter, 1991. Bandyopadhyay, Sanjukta. “Meghe Dhaka Tara.” In Thakurmar Jhuli, 61. Kolkata: Ananda, 2000. Banerjee, Haimanti. Ritwik Kumar Ghatak: A Monograph. Pune: National Film Archive of India, 1985. Banerjee, Karuna. An Actress in Her Time. Jamshedpur: Celluloid Chapter, 1999. Banerjee, Prathama. Politics of Time: “Primitives” and History Writing in a Colonial Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Banerjee, Shampa, ed. Ritwik Ghatak, Cinema India. New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1982. Banerjee, Sumanta. India’s Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising. London: Zed, 1980. ——. In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India. Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980. Banerjee, Sushmita. “A Cinema of Partitioned Subjects: Ritwik Ghatak, 1960–1974.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2014. Barnouw, Erik, and S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Basu, Sunipa, and Sibaditya Dasgupta, eds. Chinnamul: Nemai Ghosher Prabandha, Boktrita, Sakkhatkar. Kolkata: Cine Central and Monchasha, 2003. Baucom, Ian. History 4° Celsius. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema?, vol. 1. Selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Beale, Ruth. Lindgren and Langlois: The Archive Paradox. London: Arts Council, 2011. Bellour, Raymond. “Satyajit Ray, positions du probleme.” Trafic, no. 101 (March 2017): 82–86. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Berlant, Lauren, and Kathleen Stewart. The Hundreds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Betz, Mark. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bhaskar, Ira. “The Indian New Wave.” In Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, ed. K. Moti Gokulsing, Wimal Dissanayake, and Rohit Dasgupta. New York: Routledge, 2013. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203556054. ——. “Myth and Ritual: Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara.” Journal of Arts and Ideas 3 (April 1983): 43–50. Bhaskaran, Gautaman. Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life in Cinema. New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2010. Bhatia, Nandi. Acts of Authority / Acts of Resistance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Bhattacharjee, Sankarlal, ed. Nemai Ghosh’s Kolkata. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2014.

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Franda, Marcus F., and Paul Brass, eds. Radical Politics in South Asia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973. Frank, Aparna. “An Indian Avant- Garde: Construction and Expression in Mani Kaul’s Dilemma trilogy (1969–1973) and Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan (1972).” PhD Diss., New York University, 2015. Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ——. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Ganguly, Debjani. “The Radical Middle.” Lecture delivered at Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Dublin, June 22, 2019. Ganguly, Keya. Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Ganguly, Sunil. The Adversary. Translated by Enakshi Chatterjee. Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1974. Geiger, Jeffrey, and Karin Littau, eds. Cinematicity in Media History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Ghatak, Ritwik. Chalachitra, Manush, ebong aro Kichu. Kolkata: Dey’s, 2005. ——. Cinema and I. Kolkata: Dhyanbindu, 2015. ——. Cinema India. Edited by Shampa Banerjee. New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1982. ——. “On Subarnarekha.” Translated by Moinak Biswas. Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 18–20. ——. Rows and Rows of Fences. Calcutta: Seagull, 2000. ——. Stories. Translated by Rani Ray. Calcutta: Srishti, 2001. Ghatak, Surama. Padma theke Titas. 2nd ed. Kolkata: Anustup, 2010. ——. Ritwik. Calcutta: Anustup, 1995. Ghosh, Abhija. “Memories of Action: Tracing Film Society Cinephilia in India.” Bioscope 9, no. 2 (2018): 137–64. Ghosh, Debiprasad, ed. Bangla Bhashay Chalachitra Charcha, vol. 2, 1934–1954. Kolkata: Pratibhaash, 2011. Ghosh, Tanushree. “Witnessing Famine: The Testimonial Work of Famine Photographs and Anti-Colonial Spectatorship.” Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 3 (2019): 327–57. Gomery, Douglas. “Ethnic Theaters and Art Cinemas.” In Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentations in the United States, 180–95. London: British Film Institute, 1992. Gooptu, Sharmistha. Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation. New Delhi: Roli, 2010. Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. London: Routledge, 2005. Gopal, Sangita. Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gopal, Sangita, and Sujata Moorti. Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Government of West Bengal. Nandan, West Bengal Film Centre 1985. Calcutta: Director of Information, Govt. of West Bengal, 1985. Govil, Nitin. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

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Kale, Sunila. Electrifying India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Kalidasa. The Recognition of Shakuntala by Kalidasa. Edited and translated by Somadeva Vasudeva. New York: Clay Sanskrit Library, 2006. Kapur, Geeta. “Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray.” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 23–24 (January 1993): 17–49. ——. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000. Karanjia, B. K. Counting My Blessings. New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2005. ——. A Many-Splendored Cinema. Bombay: New Thacker’s, 1986. Kaviraj, Sudipta. “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices About Space in Calcutta.” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (1997): 83–113. ——. The Invention of Public Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Kesavan, Mukul. “Urdu, Awadh and Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema.” In Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan, 244–57. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994. Kishore, Shweta. “Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema of Resistance.” In Activist Film Festivals, ed. Socia Tascon and Tyson Wils, 259–79. Bristol: Intellect, 2016. Koepnick, Lutz. The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Kumar, Ramesh. “National Film Archives: Policies, Practices, and Histories.” Phd Diss., New York University, 2016. Kumar, Sukrita Paul. The New Story: A Scrutiny of Modernity in Hindi and Urdu Short Fiction. New Delhi: Allied, 1991. Kundu, Kalyan, Sakti Bhattacharya, and Kalyan Sircar, eds. Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath and the British Press (1912–1941). Calcutta: Shishu Sahitya Samsad, 2000. Lakshmi, C. S. “Quiet Take-Over of NFDC.” Economic and Political Weekly (May 31, 1980): 957–58. Lane, Jim. “Critical and Cultural reception of the European Art Film in 1950s America: A  Case Study of the Brattle Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts).” Film History 24 (1994), 49–64. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2020. Lev, Peter. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. MacKenzie, Scott, ed. Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Majumdar, Boria, and Kaushik Bandyopadhyay. “Ghati-Bangal on the Maidan: Subregionalism, Club Rivalry, and Fan Culture in Indian Football.” In A Social History of Indian Football: Striving to Score, ed. Majumdar and Bandyopadhyay, 92–108. London: Routledge, 2006. Majumdar, Neepa. “Importing Neorealism, Exporting Cinema.” In Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, 178–93. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012. ——. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Majumdar, Rochona. “Feluda on Feluda: A Letter to Topshe.” South Asian History and Culture 8, no. 2 (2017): 233–44.

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INDEX

Abbas, K. A., 36–37, 67 Abedin, Zainul, 168 Abraham, John, 22, 115 Acharya, N. R., 95 Action films, 99 Activism, 178, 181; anger in, 161; in Britain, 21; in cinema, 92–95, 165–66, 174–76; criticism and, 230; for C. Dasgupta, 219–20; for film societies, 103–7, 237n24, 257n65; in India, 274n47; for Mao, 181; politics of, 19, 94–95, 100–1; in postcolonialism, 177; against poverty, 173; satire of, 167. See also Naxalite movement Advani, L. K., 223 Adversary, The (Ganguly, S.), 194–96 Adversary, The (Ray, S.). See Pratidwandi Aesthetics, 10, 15–16, 264n45 Africa, 4, 12 Agamben, Giorgio, 168 Agate, James, 31 Agee, James, 31 Ajantrik (Ghatak, R.), 46 Akaler Sandhane (Sen, M.), 186 “Akash Bhora Surja Tara” (Tagore), 142 Ali, Agha Shahid, 12 Alvarez, Santiago, 174

Amar Lenin (Ghatak, R.), 121, 151 Amladi, Parag, 81 “Analyses of the Classes in Chinese Society” (Mao), 179 Anand, Chetan, 37, 95 Anderson, Benedict, 79 Anderson, Lindsay, 32 Andrew, Dudley, 31, 150 “Angar” (Embers), 168 Ankur (Benegal), 55, 59; for audiences, 63; for FFC, 74; funding for, 78; reputation of, 66 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 150 Aparajito (Ray, S.), 46, 190–91 Appadurai, Arjun, 91 Apprehension, 2, 14, 17, 47, 138, 144, 188, 227 Apu trilogy (Ray, S.): aesthetics in, 15–16; Calcutta trilogy compared to, 155, 157; for cinema, 68, 192; City trilogy compared to, 189–91; as realism, 9; reputation of, 103; sources for, 44; women in, 214 Aranyak (Bandyopadhyay, B.), 72 Aranyer Din Ratri (Ray, S.), 192 Aravindan, G., 113, 225 Archives: for history, 227–34; in India, 10, 102; National Film Archives, 3–4, 29, 93,

296 Index Archives (continued) 96, 123; Pune film archives, 104; Satyajit Ray Archives, 278n32 Art: Bangladesh for, 8–9; cinema as, 1, 44–50, 48–51, 52, 235n1; criticism of, 64–65; entertainment compared to, 30–31; for humanism, 229–30; Partition trilogy as, 150–51; popular films as, 6; society related to, 13–14 “Art, Culture and Quality” (Ellis), 29 Art cinema. See specific topics Art of Five Directors, The (Seton), 39, 40, 42, 43–44 Ashani Sanket (Ray, S.), 118, 185–86, 198 Ashk, Upendranath, 78 Asquith, Anthony, 29 “Atmahatyar Adhikar” (short story), 166 Attenborough, Richard, 224 Audiences: Ankur for, 63; City trilogy for, 217–18; for filmmakers, 32–33; impure spectators in, 201; Interview for, 171; Pather Panchali for, 44; poverty for, 170, 176–77; for M. Sen, 45 Avant-garde cinema, 58 Bachchan, Amitabh, 15, 81, 155–56, 188 de Baecque, Antoine, 31 Bagchi, Amiya, 121, 123 Bahadur, Satish, 104, 245n52 Baishey Shravana (Sen, M.), 169, 186 Baker, L. W., 8 Bakshi, Ramesh, 76 Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 44, 72, 195 Bandyopadhyay, Samik, 113, 128, 184 Bandyopadhyay, Sanjukta, 151–52 Bandyopadhyay, Tarasankar, 195 Banerjee, Dibakar, 226 Banerjee, Karuna, 35, 159 Banerjee, Sumanta, 108, 131–32 Bangladesh: anger in, 163–65; for art, 8–9; cinema and, 19–20, 46–47, 173–74, 217–18; communism in, 183; culture of, 145–47, 153, 177–78, 190–91, 218–19; famine in, 168, 185–86; history of, 81, 83, 173; India and, 108–9, 161–62, 186–88; literature from, 194–95, 197–98; masculinity in, 213–17, 217; modernization for, 77–78; Naxalite

movement in, 108, 162–63, 181; Pakistan and, 168–69; poetry from, 14, 210–11; refugees from, 221–22; romanticism from, 174 “Bansi” (Tagore), 140 Baptista, Clement, 95 Bardhan, Pranab, 123 Bartosch, Berthold, 39 Barwell, Noel, 196 Basu, Rajsekhar, 195 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 45 Bazin, André, 31, 90–91 Bellour, Raymond, 207 Benegal, Shyam, 22, 55, 61, 63, 74, 93 Bengal. See Bangladesh Benjamin, Walter, 242n5 Bergman Film Festival, 110 Berkeley, Busby, 99 Berlant, Lauren, 190, 242n6 Bhadra, Gautam, 123 bhadralok, 81, 83, 120, 197, 212 bhajan (song), 210 Bhaskar, Ira, 68, 248n28 Bhatt, M. D., 38 Bhattacharya, Basu, 66 Bhattacharya, Bijon, 93, 128 Bhattacharya, Chittaprosad, 168 Bhattacharya, Gurudas, 105 Bhattacharya, Kamalakanta, 146 Bhattacharya, Nirmal, 105 Bhattacharya, Sourin, 192 Bhaumik, Kaushik, 75 Bhavan, Max Mueller, 111 Bhownagary, Jean, 38 Bhuvan Shome (Sen, M.): for India, 53–54, 58–59, 166; legacy of, 65, 68, 154, 250n88; as New Wave cinema, 79–81, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87–89, 90–91 Big City, The (Mitra, N.), 195 Bijlani, Mohan, 78 Biswas, Debabrata, 149, 218 Biswas, Hemanga, 255n32 Biswas, Moinak, 133, 145, 192, 218 Black Jacobins (James), 221 Bloch, Marc, 13 Bollywood, 25–26, 66, 226. See also specific topics Bombay Film Society, 95, 102 Bordwell, David, 31, 106

Index 297 Bresson, Robert, 58–59, 249n54 Brief Encounter (Lean), 30 Britain: activism in, 21; aesthetics from, 264n45; criticism from, 29–31; Europe compared to, 29; India and, 3–4, 11, 31, 81, 83, 95–96, 243n16; poetry from, 137; politics in, 224; postcolonialism for, 79; for S. Ray, 246n59; romanticism from, 156; Seton for, 29–30 Brown, John Mason, 31 Bruno, Giuliana, 16 Buñuel, Luis, 45, 104 Burman, Ashis, 158 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (Wiene), 45 Calcutta Film Society (CFS), 93, 95–97, 99–100, 103–4, 112–13, 255n38 Calcutta 71 (Sen, M.), 118, 120; Interview compared to, 163–64; politics in, 171–77, 172; themes in, 161–66, 162, 164–65, 167, 168–71 Calcutta trilogy (Sen, M.), 14–15; City trilogy compared to, 193–94, 199; culture in, 155–57; for film societies, 270n63; for India, 46, 171–77, 172, 185–88; reputation of, 267n1; themes in, 158–66, 162, 164–65, 167, 168–71, 177–86, 184 Campbell, Joseph, 144–45 Cannes film festival, 34 Carr, E. H., 227 Celluloid Film Society, 5, 10–11, 114 Censorship: of cinema, 38; for film societies, 256n43, 258n91; from Gandhi, I., 257n56; Indian Cinematograph Act as, 102; for S. Ray, 90 Césaire, Aimé, 12 CFS. See Calcutta Film Society Chakrabarty, Dipendu, 174–75 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 91, 139–40, 228, 236n12 Chakrabarty, P. B., 105 Chakrabarty, Utpalendu, 174 Chakraborty, Probodh Dhar, 120 Chakraborty, Utpalendu, 108 Chandavarkar, Bhaskar, 128 Chandler, James, 156 Chandragupta, Bansi, 93 Chaplin, Charlie, 31, 43, 66, 99 Charulata (Ray, S.), 80–81, 86, 189, 210, 213–14

Chase, James Hadley, 198, 273n36 Chatterjee, Basu, 93, 104, 106, 225 Chatterjee, Partha, 7, 53, 63, 136, 216–17 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra, 251n97 Chaudhuri, Nirad, 75–76 Chaudhuri, Supriya, 156–57, 193 Chauhan, Manhar, 76 Chaya ghanaiche (song), 210 Cherkasov, Nikolai, 100 Chien Andalou, Un (Buñuel), 45 China, 108, 221–22. See also Mao; Maoism Chinnamul (Ghosh, Nemai), 37, 45–46, 219 Chiriyakhana (Ray, S.), 218 Chitrabhaash (film periodical), 122, 164, 239n34, 267n7 Chitrabikshan (film periodical), 100, 119, 176 Chitralekha film society, 8, 93, 99, 114, 115, 116 Chopra, B. R., 63 Chopra, Yash, 63, 156 Chowdhury, Khaled, 138 Chowdhury, Nusrat, 211 Chowringhee (Sankar), 196–97 Chun, Wendy, 228 Cinema: for Abbas, 67; activism in, 92–95, 165–66, 174–75; aesthetics of, 10; anger in, 155–56; Apu trilogy for, 68, 192; as art, 1, 44–50, 48–51, 52, 235n1; avant-garde, 58; Bangladesh and, 19–20, 46–47, 173–74, 217–18; for Britain, 29–30; censorship, 38; cinematography, 122, 158–60, 203–4; commercial films, 27–28, 66–67, 93; corruption in, 193–95, 211, 212; criticism in, 178–79; Eisenstein for, 11, 38; in Europe, 8; Film Enquiry Committee (1951), 27–34; French, 12; genres of, 21; for R. Ghatak, 12; global South in, 156–57; as “good,” 20–21; Gopalakrishnan for, 78; history of, 4, 5, 236n5; humanism in, 176–77; ideology in, 161; from India, 25–26, 45, 53–54, 223–30, 244n7, 257n70; intersectionality in, 15; in Latin America, 248n29; literature and, 75–81, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87–89, 90–91; melodrama in, 47; modernism in, 193; mythology in, 144–45; nationalism in, 32, 52; Naxalite movement in, 257n76; opening

298 Index Cinema (continued) sequences in, 207, 208–9, 210; poetry in, 150–51; political, 64, 95, 107–10, 110, 118, 123, 154–55, 171–77, 172, 218; politicians in, 237n19; politics of, 9, 253n3; popular films, 5–6, 253n5; postcolonialism in, 205–7; prejudice against, 96–97; prose poetry for, 139–42; S. Ray related to, 11, 60–70, 189–90, 198–99, 199–200, 201; realism in, 31; recreational, 33; Russian, 104–5, 255n32; M. Sen related to, 53–54, 60–61, 159; sexuality in, 73, 274n43; song sequences in, 130–31; sound in, 261n8; Tagore for, 129; teaching, 11; third cinema, 18–19, 109, 218, 240n67, 241n68, 246n66; from U.S., 27–28, 44–45; women in, 213–17, 217. See also specific topics “Cinema and the Subjective Factor” (Ghatak, R.), 132 Cine Politics (Prasad), 7 Citizen Kane (Welles), 56–57, 95 Citizenship, 7 City trilogy (Ray, S.), 16; Apu trilogy compared to, 189–91; Calcutta trilogy compared to, 193–94, 199; for culture, 217–22; gender in, 213–17, 217; narrative devices in, 198–99, 199–200, 201; new strategies in, 207, 208–9, 210–13, 212; song sequences in, 210–13; stories for, 194–98; youth in, 201–7, 203–4, 206 Clair, René, 39, 104 Cloud-Capped Star, The (Ghatak, R.). See Meghe Dhaka Tara Commercial cinema, 27–28, 66–67, 93 Communication, 61 Communism: in Bangladesh, 183; history of, 180–81; for India, 108, 162–63, 172; Naxalite movement for, 177–78; politics of, 118–20, 172–73, 193, 218–21, 253n6 Company Limited (Ray, S.). See Seemabaddha Cooke, Alan, 32 Corruption: in cinema, 193–95, 211, 212; in India, 91, 155, 161, 169, 221 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 15, 181 Crisis of Political Modernism, The (Rodowick), 78–79 Criticism: activism and, 230; of art, 64–65; from Britain, 29–31; in cinema, 178–79;

of commercial cinema, 66–67; of filmmakers, 78, 225–26, 276n79; of R. Ghatak, 120–21, 246n66; of Indian New Wave cinema, 53–54, 59–68, 248n28; of Jana Aranya, 271n1; of Padatik, 270n63; of Pather Panchali, 26; of popular films, 60; by Ramakrishna, 63–64; of S. Ray, 115, 117–18, 190–94, 217–22, 248n27; of M. Sen, 118–20, 119, 154–55, 171–77, 172, 185–88, 268n13; Seton for, 39, 41, 45–46; from U.S., 31 Culture: of Bangladesh, 145–47, 153, 177–78, 190–91, 218–19; in Calcutta trilogy, 155–57; City trilogy for, 217–22; of India, 1–2, 21–22, 158–59, 184–85, 274n48; modernization for, 4–5; nature and, 37–38; Naxalite movement for, 195–96; politics and, 161–62; popular, 157; popular cinema for, 5–6; in postcolonialism, 194–95, 219–20; S. Ray for, 98–99; society and, 13–14; song sequences for, 141–42; valuedistinctions in, 98 Daasi (Rao, B.), 225 Dalal / dalali, 211, 212 Dasgupta, Chidananda, 66, 75; activism for, 219–20; CFS for, 103–4; film societies for, 96–98, 101, 106–7; R. Ghatak for, 140–41; S. Ray for, 198–99, 201, 216 Dasgupta, Harisadhan, 96, 104 Dasgupta, Shuvendu, 112–13, 123, 175 Dass, Manishita, 130–31 Dave, Ratilal, 101, 105 Deb, Narendra, 45 Decolonization, 3 Deewar (Chopra, Y.), 156 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 91, 239n56 Delhi Film Society, 97, 99, 104 Deren, Maya, 31 De Sica, Vittorio, 11, 56 Dev, Amiya, 77 Devi (Ray, S.), 115, 189, 191–92 Devi, Mahasweta, 132 Dey, Bishnu, 133–34 “Dhaner Khete Roudro Chhayay Lukochuri Khela” (Tagore), 142 Dharker, Anil, 72, 74

Index 299 Dickens, Charles, 163 Dickinson, Thorold, 30 Do Bigha Zamin (Roy, S.), 36, 98 Documentary filmmakers, 81, 95–96 Dolce Vita, La (Fellini), 14 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 39 “Dream of an El Dorado” (Ghatak, R.), 131–32 Dubey, Satyadev, 172 Dutt, Utpal, 93, 128 Duvidha (Kaul, M.), 55, 58–59, 65 Dwyer, Rachel, 224 Earth (Dovzhenko), 39 E-Flat (Ghatak, R.). See Komal Gandhar Egypt, 4 Eisenstein, Sergei: for cinema, 11, 38; influence of, 45, 104–5; legacy of, 34, 36, 39, 43 Ek Din Achanak (Sen, M.), 225 Elitism, 7–8 Ellis, John, 29–31 Entertainment, 30–31 Ericsson, Peter, 32 Escapism, 30–31 Europe, 8, 29, 31–32, 57 Famine, 168–69, 185–87 Farber, Manny, 31 Fay, Jennifer, 189 Fellini, Frederico, 14, 79 Fergusson, Otis, 31 FFC. See Film Finance Corporation Film. See Cinema Film as an Art and Film Appreciation (Seton), 39, 43, 52 Film festivals: Bergman, 110; Cannes, 34; for FFC, 76; Heggodu, 113–15; for India, 3–4, 34, 44–46, 62–63, 68, 73 Film Finance Corporation (FFC): Bhuvan Shome for, 80; Film festivals for, 76; Films Division of, 81; history of, 53; for India, 70–75, 71; politics of, 58–59, 66–67, 69, 76–77 Filmikon (Celluloid Film Society), 5, 10–11 Film institutions, 96 Filmmakers: for Abbas, 67; audiences for, 32–33; criticism of, 78, 225–26, 276n79; documentary, 81, 95–96; FFC for, 72;

film societies for, 230, 253n6; gimmicks for, 57–58; history for, 2, 13; from India, 69; Indian New Wave cinema for, 68–69, 238n30; for Padgaonkar, 65–66; politics for, 90–91, 108, 248n29, 259n102; postcolonialism for, 229 Film periodicals, 99–100, 123; Chitrabhaash, 122, 164, 239n34, 267n7; Chitrabikshan, 100, 119, 176 Film societies, 239n41; activism for, 103–7, 237n24, 257n65; Bahadur for, 245n52; Bombay Film Society, 95, 102; Calcutta trilogy for, 270n63; Celluloid Film Society, 5, 10–11, 114; censorship for, 256n43, 258n91; CFS, 93, 95–97, 99–100, 103–4, 112–13, 255n38; Chitralekha film society, 8, 93, 99, 114, 115, 116; for C. Dasgupta, 96–98, 101, 106–7; Delhi Film Society, 97, 99, 104; democratization of, 110, 111, 112–15, 114, 116–17, 117–23, 119, 122; for documentary filmmakers, 95–96; for filmmakers, 230, 253n6; history of, 253n1; for India, 8, 62–63, 92–95; Ninasam Film Society, 113–15; North Calcutta Film Society, 122; Pather Panchali for, 104; Patna Film Society, 97; politics of, 95–103, 107–10, 110, 260n119; popular cinema for, 253n5; for Seton, 38–39, 41, 43–44 Film studies: history of, 4, 5, 68, 103–7, 227–30; in India, 50, 52, 67–68, 278n32; M. Kaul for, 61, 63; Partition trilogy in, 127; pedagogy for, 26; S. Ray for, 4, 54; M. Sen for, 190–91; Subaltern Studies School, 17–18 Flaherty, Robert, 31 Flaubert, Gustav, 150 Flickorna (Zetterling), 201 Ford, John, 66, 90 Foreign films, 101–2, 121, 245n50, 256n46, 256n49, 274n43 “Four and a Quarter” (Ray, S.), 54, 59 France, 12, 19, 55–57 Frank, Aparna, 68–69 Gadgil, Narhar Vishnu, 205 Gadyakabita. See Prose poetry Galbraith, John Kenneth, 104 Gandhi (Attenborough), 224–25

300 Index Gandhi, Indira, 96, 109, 162, 197, 224–25, 257n56 Gandhi, Leela, 90 Gandhi, M. K., 9–10, 18, 224–25, 243n17 Gandhi’s Printing Press (Hofmeyr), 9 Ganguly, Debjani, 228 Ganguly, Keya, 12, 107, 194–97, 217, 272n27 Garam Hawa (Sathyu), 55, 59, 66 García Espinosa, Julio, 218 Garewal, Simi, 179 Gender, 168, 179–80, 213–17, 217, 270n66 Germany, 69 Getino, Octavio, 18–19, 218 Ghashiram Kotwal (film), 78 Ghatak, Gita, 149 Ghatak, Manish, 132 Ghatak, Ritwik, 2, 238n31; cinema for, 12; correspondence with, 244n30; criticism of, 120–21, 246n66; early career of, 8– 9, 33; FFC for, 72; film societies for, 101; influence of, 59; Kracauer for, 10; Literature for, 131–33; politics for, 12–13, 260n115; S. Ray and, 46–47, 104, 129; reputation of, 22, 48–50, 52, 63, 115, 151–53; M. Sen related to, 93, 109, 169; for Seton, 44; Tagore for, 132–37, 263n32; for third cinema, 240n67, 246n66. See also specific works Ghose, Gautam, 78, 108, 227 Ghosh, Abhija, 103 Ghosh, Amitav, 22 Ghosh, Anjan, 123 Ghosh, Atulya, 105 Ghosh, Nemai, 37, 46, 93, 112, 219, 267n8 Ghosh, Nirmal Kumar, 172–73 Ghosh, Nityapriya, 175 Ghosh, Rituparno, 226 Ghosh, Sujoy, 226 Gidwani, Motilal, 67 Global South, 156–57 Godard, Jean-Luc, 17, 56–57, 118, 172–74 Golden Line, The (Ghatak, R.). See Subarnarekha Gooptu, Sharmistha, 75 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Ray, S.), 195 Gopal, Priyamvada, 93 Gopal, Sangita, 73, 226, 232, 253n6, 259n102, 261n14

Gopalakrishnan, Adoor, 8, 22, 61, 225; for cinema, 78; film societies for, 98–99, 115; leadership of, 93 Grémillion, Jean, 100 Griffith, D. W., 242n7 Guerrilla Fighter, The (Sen, M.). See Padatik Guha, Ranajit, 13, 18, 129 Gunning, Tom, 203, 236n5 Gupta, Akhil, 19 Gupta, Dhruba, 112–13, 123 Gupta, Mahendra, 101 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 80, 218 Halder, Ram, 101, 103–7 Hansen, Miriam, 236n5, 242n7 Hartog, François, 6, 235n2 Hawkins, R. E., 95 Heggodu Film Festival, 113–15 Heidegger, Martin, 137, 264n47 Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais), 105 History: of anger, 168– 69, 183; archives for, 227–34; of Bangladesh, 81, 83, 173; of CFS, 95– 97, 255n38; of Chitralekha film society, 8, 93, 99, 114, 115, 116; of cinema, 4, 5, 236n5; of communism, 180–81; of decolonization, 3; of FFC, 53; for filmmakers, 2, 13; of film societies, 253n1; of film studies, 4, 5, 68, 103–7, 227–30; of India, 21–22, 37–38, 175–76, 242n8; in Interview, 14–15; of Naxalite movement, 194; in Padatik, 14–15; of Partition trilogy, 127–30; in postcolonialism, 1–3, 17–21; of song sequences, 129–30; of South Asia, 2 History at the Limits of World History (Guha), 129 Hitchcock, Alfred, 66 Ho Chi Minh, 83, 157 Hoek, Lotte, 122 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 9 Holderlin, Friedrich, 137 Hollywood, 66, 74, 216 “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones” (Holderlin), 137 Hora de los Hornos, La (Solanas and Getino), 18–19, 80 Houston, Penelope, 32

Index 301 Humanism, 176–77, 229–30 “Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts” (Ghatak, R.), 144 Hungry Autumn (Ghose, G.), 121 Huston, John, 31 Ibrahim, Punen, 104 L’Idée (Bartosch), 39 Identity, 19, 69, 120–21 Ideology: in cinema, 161; of Maoism, 174–76, 221; of nationalism, 180–81; of patriarchy, 216–17; in politics, 3, 155– 56 Impure spectators, 201 India: activism in, 274n47; archives in, 10, 102; Bangladesh and, 108– 9, 161– 62, 186–88; Bhuvan Shome for, 53–54, 58–59, 166; Britain and, 3–4, 11, 31, 81, 83, 95– 96, 243n16; Calcutta trilogy for, 46, 171–77, 172, 185–88; Chaplin for, 99; China and, 221–22; cinema from, 25–26, 45, 53–54, 223–30, 244n7, 257n70; communism for, 108, 162– 63, 172; corruption in, 91, 155, 161, 169, 221; culture of, 1–2, 21–22, 158–59, 184–85, 274n48; elitism in, 7–8; Europe for, 31–32; famine in, 169; FFC for, 70–75, 71; Film Enquiry Committee, 27–34; film festivals for, 3–4, 34, 44–46, 62– 63, 68, 73; film institutions in, 96; filmmakers from, 69; film societies for, 8, 62– 63, 92– 95; film studies in, 50, 52, 67– 68, 278n32; foreign films for, 101–2, 121, 245n50, 256n46, 256n49, 274n43; gender in, 179–80, 270n66; history of, 21–22, 37–38, 175–76, 242n8; Hollywood for, 74; Indian Cinematograph Act, 102; intellectualism in, 44–45; intergenerational bonds in, 182–84, 184; intersectional coalition for, 179–82; language in, 22; masculinity in, 190– 91; modernization for, 17, 34, 35, 36–39, 40, 41, 42, 43–44; nationalism in, 32, 136; Nehru for, 4, 11; NFDC for, 223–24; oppression in, 170–71; Pakistan for, 129; partition for, 127–28, 168– 69; Pather Panchali for,

33; poetry in, 133–37; politics in, 47, 70–71, 73, 81, 177–79, 204–5; postcolonialism for, 3– 6, 5, 12–17, 123, 170, 193– 94, 228–29, 244n29; poverty in, 161– 66; producers in, 243n14; radical film in, 103; S. Ray for, 54–59, 103; Renoir for, 100; Russian cinema for, 255n32; satire of, 160– 61; for Satpathy, 63– 64; scarcity in, 185; Seton for, 37–41, 43–44, 100, 104; Subaltern Studies School in, 17–18; youth in, 155–57. See also specific topics Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation, 70 “Indian New Wave, An” (Ray, S.), 54–55 Indian New Wave cinema: Bhuvan Shome as, 79–81, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87–89, 90– 91; criticism of, 53–54, 59– 68, 248n28; for FFC, 73; for filmmakers, 68– 69, 238n30; for Rajadhyaksha, 79; for S. Ray, 54–59, 69–70 Inner Eye, The (Ray, S.), 198–99 Intellectualism, 44–45 Intergenerational bonds, 182–84, 184 Intersectionality, 15 Interview (Sen, M.): for audiences, 171; Calcutta 71 compared to, 163–64; history in, 14–15; themes in, 158–61. See also Calcutta trilogy Intolerance (Griffith), 242n7 Italy, 56, 246n60 “Itihaser Asraye” (Sen, M.), 186 Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Eisenstein), 105 Ivens, Joris, 176 Jaikumar, Priya, 129, 262n16 Jalsaghar (Ray, S.), 189, 192 James, C. L. R., 221 Janah, Sunil, 105, 168 Jana Aranya (Ray, S.), 189–90, 271n1. See also City trilogy Jeffries, Deryck, 95 Jepson, M., 95 “Journey Through India” (Seton), 36–37 Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Ghatak, R.), 19–20, 48, 50 Jung, C. C., 47, 128, 145 Junglee (Mukherjee), 81

302 Index Kabir, Alamgir, 121–22 Kahaani (Ghosh, S.), 226 Kameradschaft (Pabst), 39 Kanchenjungha (Ray, S.), 115, 117–18, 189, 192 Kapoor, Raj, 39, 58 Kapur, Geeta, 192 Karanjia, B. K., 70–75 Kathakata Kamalalaya O Prashanga Film Society (Halder), 103–7 Kaul, Arul, 60, 77, 78, 110, 112 Kaul, Mani, 22, 53, 55, 172; for film studies, 61, 63; narrative methods of, 69; S. Ray for, 61–62; reputation of, 58–59, 65, 76, 109; Shahani compared to, 68–69 Kesavan, Mukul, 75 Khanna, Harish, 72 Khazanchi (Gidwani), 67 Khidkee (Santoshi), 67 Kluge, Alexander, 69 Kodiyettam (Gopalakrishnan), 78 Koepnick, Lutz, 10 Komal Gandhar (Ghatak, R.), 14, 127, 133–37, 135. See also Partition trilogy Komal Gandhar (Tagore), 133 Koselleck, Reinhart, 271n1 Kracauer, Siegfried, 10, 242n5 Kshudhita Pashan (Sinha), 81 Kumar, Ashok, 244n30 Kumar, Uttam, 218 Kurosawa, Akira, 104 Lahiri, Pramod, 105–6, 120 Lal, Lakshmi Narayan, 76 Lambert, Gavin, 32 Langlois, Henri, 123, 227–28 Language, 22, 211–13 Laski, Harold, 28–29 Latin America, 18, 241n68, 248n29, 267n7 Lean, David, 30, 43 Lejeune, C. A., 31 Leyden, Rudi von, 95 Lindgren, Ernst, 29, 123 Literature: adaptations from, 194–98; “Atmahatyar Adhikar,” 166; from Bangladesh, 194–95, 197–98; cinema and, 75–81, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87–89, 90–91; for R. Ghatak, 131–33; for Komal Gandhar, 133–37; for Partition trilogy, 130–31; prose

poetry as, 139–42; by Sankar, 194–97; short stories, 131–32; for Subarnarekha, 137–39, 139; women in, 214 Lower Depths (Kurosawa), 104 Mahabharata (film), 155 Mahajan, K. K., 80–81, 158 Mahanagar (Ray, S.), 189 Main Zinda Hoon (Mishra), 225 Majumdar, Tarun, 112 Malik, Amita, 104 Malraux, Andre, 58, 75 Mann, Michael, 204–5 Manthan (film), 78 Manvell, Roger, 29 Maoism, 162–63, 174–76, 221. See also Padatik Mao Zedong, 157, 175, 179–83, 197 Marattam (Aravindan), 225 Marker, Chris, 19 Marx, Karl, 128 Marxism. See Communism Masculin Féminin (Godard), 57 Masculinity, 190–91, 213–17 Maya Darpan (Shahani), 55, 58–59, 77 Maya Darpan (Verma, N.), 77 Mazumdar, Ranjani, 91, 155, 232, 267n5 Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ghatak, R.), 49; in film studies, 127; Padatik compared to, 184; postcolonialism in, 14, 121; song sequences in, 142, 143, 144–47, 148, 149–50; themes of, 47–50. See also Partition trilogy “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (Bandyopadhyay, Sanjukta), 151–52 Meher, Sadhu, 80–81 Mehra, Prakash, 155 Mehta, Arvind, 60–61 Melodrama, 47 Memories of Underdevelopment (Gutiérrez), 80 Men of Two Worlds (Dickinson), 30 Menon, V. K. Krishna, 28–29, 34 Menra, Balraj, 76 Mera Naam Joker (Kapoor), 58 “Michiler Mukh” (Mukhopadhyay, Subhas), 174 Middleman, The. See Jana Aranya Million, Le (Clair), 39

Index 303 Mishra, Sudhir, 225 Mitra, Narendranath, 195 Mitra, Premendra, 75 Mitra, Subrata, 93 Modernism, 78–79, 193, 220 Modernization: for Bangladesh, 77–78; for Bollywood, 25–26, 226; of commercial cinema, 27–28; for culture, 4–5; identity in, 19; for India, 17, 34, 35, 36–39, 40, 41, 42, 43–44; nationalism and, 192; Nehru for, 16–17, 25–26 Mohan, Devendra, 76 Mohan, Ram, 80–81 Morgan, Daniel, 90–91 Mufti, Aamir, 12 Mukherjee, Ashutosh, 181 Mukherjee, Hrishikesh, 72 Mukherjee, Kamaleshwar, 151 Mukherjee, Madhabi, 168–69 Mukherjee, Mani Sankar. See Sankar Mukherjee, Sashadhar, 244n30 Mukherjee, Subodh, 81 Mukherji, Srijit, 227 Mukhopadhyay, Balai Chand, 80 Mukhopadhyay, Sailajananda, 75 Mukhopadhyay, Subhas, 132 Mukhopadhyay, Suman, 227 Mukti Chai (Chakraborty, U.), 121 Mulay, Suhasini, 166 Mulay, Vijaya, 97, 99 Munna (Abbas), 36–37 Murari, Jagat, 104 Myrdal, Gunnar, 173 Mythology, 144–45 “Myths for Sale” (Shahani), 62 “Naam Rekhechi Komal Gandhar Mone Mone” (Dey), 133 Nagarik (Ghatak, R.), 45–46 Nair, K. B., 115 Nair, Mira, 225 Nair, P. K., 93, 123 Nandy, Ashis, 90 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 4 National Film Archives, 3–4, 29, 93, 96, 104, 123, 232, 243n17 National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), 70, 223–25. See also Film Finance Corporation

Nationalism, 32, 52, 136, 180–81, 192 Naxalite movement: in Bangladesh, 108, 162–63, 181; in cinema, 257n76; for communism, 177–78; for culture, 195–96; history of, 194; violence in, 219 Nayak (Ray, S.), 218 Nazarin, 104 Neale, Steve, 32, 236n13 Neecha Nagar (Anand), 37, 95 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 226; for India, 4, 11; for modernization, 16–17, 25–26; postcolonialism for, 205; for Seton, 36, 52 Neorealism, 37, 56, 246n60 New Wave cinema. See Indian New Wave cinema “New Wave Cinema and I, The” (Ray, S.), 69 NFDC. See National Film Development Corporation Ngai, Sianne, 57 Ninasam Film Society, 113–15 Non-Aligned Movement, 4 North Calcutta Film Society, 122 O’Donnell, Erin, 247n66 Oka Oori Katha (Sen, M.), 66–67 Opening sequences, 207, 208–9, 210, 252n120 Oppression, 170–71 Our Films Their Films (Ray, S.), 11, 238n31, 239n33, 239nn46–47, 247n3, 254n15, 254n18, 255n6, 261n14 Pabst, Georg, 39 Padatik (Sen, M.), 118, 120; criticism of, 270n63; history in, 14–15; Meghe Dhaka Tara compared to, 184; themes in, 177–86, 184. See also Calcutta trilogy Padgaonkar, Dilip, 63, 65–66 Pakistan, 108, 127, 129, 168–69 Palekar, Amol, 225 Papageno (Reiniger), 39 Parikh, Jagdish, 74 Partition trilogy (Ghatak, R.): as art, 150–51; history of, 127–30; literature for, 130–31; postcolonialism in, 14; prose poetry for, 139–42; refugees in, 137–39, 139; song sequences in, 142, 143, 144–47, 148, 149–50; subject matter in, 133–37, 135, 151–53

304 Index Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 150, 266n92 Pather Panchali (Ray, S.), 16–17, 190, 272n25; for audiences, 44; Chinnamul compared to, 45–46; criticism of, 26; Do Bigha Zamin compared to, 98; FFC for, 75; for film societies, 104; for India, 33; as Indian New Wave cinema, 54–55; poverty in, 168; reputation of, 67–68, 70; as satire, 244n34; for Seton, 36–37, 41, 42; women in, 214 Pathy, P. V., 95 Patil, S. K., 27–29, 96 Patna Film Society, 97 Patriarchy, 213 Patwardhan, Anand, 108 Pedagogy, 6–12, 26 Persona (Bergman), 274n43 Poetry: from Bangladesh, 14, 210–11; in cinema, 150–51; in India, 133–37; prose, 130, 139–42; for Tagore, 264n48. See also Tagore Politicians, 237n19 Politics: of activism, 19, 94–95, 100–1; in Britain, 224; in Calcutta 71, 171–77, 172; of cinema, 9, 253n3; of citizenship, 7; of communism, 118–20, 172–73, 193, 218–21, 253n6; culture and, 161–62; of FFC, 58–59, 66–67, 69, 76–77; for filmmakers, 90–91, 108, 248n29, 259n102; of film societies, 95–103, 107–10, 110, 260n119; for R. Ghatak, 12–13, 260n115; ideology in, 3, 155–56; in India, 47, 70–71, 73, 81, 177–79, 204–5; of intergenerational bonds, 182–84, 184; as intersectional coalition, 179–82; political modernism, 94; political pamphleteering, 170–71; of postcolonialism, 221–22; radicalism in, 15–16; for S. Ray, 12–13, 15–16; for M. Sen, 12–13; for Tagore, 150; of youth, 154–55 Pollock, Sheldon, 77 Pommer, Erich, 32 Popular culture, 157 Popular films, 5–6, 253n5 Postcolonialism: activism in, 177; in Africa, 4; for Britain, 79; in cinema, 205–7; culture in, 194–95, 219–20; for filmmakers, 229; for global South, 156; history in, 1–3, 17–21; identity in, 69, 120–21; for India, 3–6, 5, 12–17, 123, 170,

193–94, 228–29, 244n29; in Komal Gandhar, 14; in Meghe Dhaka Tara, 14, 121; modernism in, 220; for Nehru, 205; in Partiton trilogy, 14; pedagogy in, 6–12; politics of, 221–22; for S. Ray, 25–26; song sequences in, 151; in Subarnarekha, 14 Potemkin (Eisenstein), 39 Poverty: activism against, 173; for audiences, 170, 176–77; exploitation of, 188; in India, 161–66; in Pather Panchali, 168; in Seemabaddha, 174; for youth, 269n35 Pradesh, Andhra, 162 “Prakriti” (music), 210 Pramanick, A. K., 112 Prasad, M. Madhava, 7, 68, 80–81, 237n19 Pratidwandi (Ray, S.), 113, 156, 185, 189. See also City trilogy Prejudice, 96–97 Producers, 243n14 Professor Mamlock (Rappaport and Wolf), 59 Progressive Writers Association (PWA), 93 Prose poetry, 130, 139–42 Provincialism, 130 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 39, 100 PWA. See Progressive Writers Association Queen, Ellery, 198 Que Viva Mexico (Eisenstein), 36, 104 Quinn, James, 100 Rabindrasangeet, 14, 135, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 210, 212, 213, 261n8 Radical film, 96–97, 103 Radicalism, 15–16 Raha, Kironmoy, 105 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 27, 62, 79, 109, 192, 249n41, 261n8 Rajanigandha (Chatterjee, P.), 63 Rakesh, Mohan, 76 Ramakrishna, R., 63–64 Rao, B. Narsing, 225 Rao, Narahari, 97–98 Rappaport, Herbert, 59 Ray, Debesh, 187 Ray, Satyajit, 2, 238n31; adaptations for, 194–98; Bhuvan Shome for, 91; Britain

Index 305 for, 246n59; censorship for, 90; for CFS, 93, 100; cinema related to, 11, 60–70, 189–90, 198–99, 199–200, 201; criticism of, 115, 117–18, 190–94, 217–22, 248n27; for Culture, 98–99; early career of, 8–9; FFC for, 74; for film studies, 4, 54; K. Ganguly for, 272n27; R. Ghatak and, 46–47, 104, 129; for India, 54–59, 103; Indian New Wave cinema for, 54–59, 69–70; influence of, 22, 60–61; for M. Kaul, 61–62; legacy of, 64–65, 278n32; in media, 117, 118; Partition trilogy for, 127; politics for, 12–13, 15–16; postcolonialism for, 25–26; radical film for, 96–97; reputation of, 22, 67–68, 94, 217–18, 226, 276n79; screenplays for, 239n34, 247n19; M. Sen compared to, 156, 171–72, 185–86, 201, 205–6, 253n6; Seton and, 35, 36, 191, 194; Tagore for, 275n62; time for, 271n1. See also specific works Realism: Apu trilogy as, 9; in cinema, 31; modernism compared to, 78–79; neorealism compared to, 37; Renoir for, 110 Recreational cinema, 33 Red Desert (Antonioni), 150 Refugees, 137–39, 139, 219, 221–22 Règle du Jeu, La (Renoir), 56–57, 90 Reiniger, Lotte, 39 Reisz, Karel, 32 Renoir, Jean, 11, 31, 56–57, 95, 100, 110 Resnais, Alain, 105 River, The (Renoir), 95 Rocha, Glauber, 17, 218 Rodowick, D. N., 78–79 Romanticism, 156, 174 Rossellini, Roberto, 31, 56 Rotha, Paul, 39 Roy, Arundhati, 153 Roy, B. C., 244n34 Roy, Bimal, 36, 70 Roy, Mrigankasekhar, 106–8, 173 Rudra, Ashok, 75–76, 115, 117–18, 123, 173 Russian cinema, 104–5, 255n32 Salaam Bombay (Nair, M.), 225 Sankar, 194–97 Santoshi, Pyarelal, 67 Sara Akash (Chatterjee, B.), 53, 73

Sara Akash (Yadav, Rajendra), 76 Sarkar, Bhaskar, 121, 127 Sarkar, Pradeep, 226 Sarkar, Sumit, 219 Sarkar, Susobhan, 183 Sarkar, Tanika, 216–17 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12 Sathyu, M. S., 55, 66 Satire, 160–61, 167, 244n34 Satpathy, Nandini, 63–64 Satyajit Ray Archives, 278n32 Scarcity, 185 Scott, David, 3, 221 Screenplays, 239n34, 247n19 Seemabaddha (Ray, S.), 174, 185, 189. See also City trilogy Sembène, Ousmane, 218 Sen, Aparna, 227 Sen, Gita, 190 Sen, Kunal, 190–91, 278n32 Sen, Mrinal, 2, 238n31, 267n8; audiences for, 45; cinema related to, 53–54, 60–61, 159; criticism of, 118–20, 119, 154–55, 171–77, 172, 185–88, 268n13; for documentary film, 81; early career of, 8–9; famine for, 186–87; FFC for, 72–73; for film studies, 190–91; gender for, 168; R. Ghatak related to, 93, 109, 169; Godard compared to, 172–74; A. Kaul with, 78; Latin America for, 267n7; legacy of, 278n32; opening sequences for, 252n120; politics for, 12–13; S. Ray compared to, 156, 171–72, 185–86, 201, 205–6, 253n6; reputation of, 22, 65, 115, 241n75, 267n1; for Seton, 44, 46; on techniques, 86, 90–91. See also specific works Sen, Nikhil, 45 Sen, Ramprasad, 146 Sen, Tapas, 128 Sengoopta, Chandak, 192–93 Sengupta, Shaktiprosad, 175 Sethi, Nitin, 106 Seton, Marie, 11, 21; for Britain, 29–30; for criticism, 39, 41, 45–46; for India, 37–41, 43–44, 100, 104; for Menon, 34; Nehru for, 36, 52; notes from, 40; Pather Panchali for, 36–37, 41, 42; S. Ray and, 35, 36, 191, 194; reputation of, 34, 36–37; M. Sen for, 44, 46; television for, 225

306 Index Sexuality, 73, 274n43 Shahani, Kumar, 22, 55, 61–63, 68–69, 120–21, 259n102 Shakespeare, William, 135–36, 264n39 “Shakuntala” (Tagore), 135–36 Shankar, Ananda, 170 Shankar, Pandit Ravi, 83 Shantaram, V., 243n14 “Shifting Code, Dissolving Identities” (Vasudevan), 242n11 “Shishutirtha” (Tagore), 137–39, 139 Shukla, V. C., 74 Sikkim (Ray, S.), 198 Singh, Bikram, 59–60, 77 Sinha, Tapan, 81, 112 Sircar, B. N., 243n14 Sitney, P. Adams, 150 Society, 13–14 Solanas, Fernando, 18–19, 218 Solás, Humberto, 218 Sonar Kella (Ray, S.), 198 Song of the Little Road (Ray, S.). See Pather Panchali Song sequences: in cinema, 130–31; in City trilogy, 210–13; for culture, 141–42; for C. Dasgupta, 140–41; history of, 129–30; for mood, 262n30; in Partition trilogy, 142, 143, 144–47, 148, 149–50; in postcolonialism, 151 Sontag, Susan, 249n54 Sound, 261n8 Srivastava, Anil, 99, 103 Stagecoach (Ford), 90 Stewart, Kathleen, 190 Storm Over Asia (Pudovkin), 39 Subaltern Studies (Guha), 18 Subaltern Studies School, 17–18 Subarnarekha (Ghatak, R.), 14, 127, 137–39, 139. See also Partition trilogy Swarga Marta Patal (Sankar), 196 Swayamvaram (Gopalakrishnan), 78 Tagore, Rabindranath, 195, 263n31; for cinema, 129; for R. Ghatak, 132–37, 263n32; for literature, 130–31; poetry for, 264n48; politics for, 150; prose poetry by, 139–42; for S. Ray, 275n62; reputation of, 83, 132–38, 210–11, 219–20;

Shakespeare for, 264n39. See also specific works Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 163 Tata, Cyrus, 170 Teen Kanya (Ray, S.), 44 Teesta Paarer Brittanta (Ray, D.), 187 Television, 225 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 135–36, 264n39 Tendulkar, D. G., 28–29, 34 Thatcher, Margaret, 224 Theater, 133–34 Theory of Film (Kracauer), 10 Third cinema, 18–19, 109, 218, 240n67, 241n68, 246n66 Throne of Blood (Kurosawa), 104 Time in the Sun (Seton), 36, 39 Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (Ghatak, R.), 48, 51 Titash (Ghatak, R.), 151 Tweedie, James, 244n7 27 Down (Bakshi), 76 Tyler, Parker, 31 Uljhan (Acharya), 95 Uma-sangeet (Ghatak, R.), 48, 48 United States (U.S.): cinema from, 27–28, 44–45; criticism from, 31; Europe compared to, 57; film from, 44–45; Hollywood for, 66, 74 Uski Roti (Kaul, M.), 53, 58–59, 68, 76 Van Doren, Mark, 31 Varavia, Freni, 78 Varshney, Anil, 256n46, 256n49 Vasudevan, Ravi, 192, 236n11, 242n11 Verma, Nirmal, 77, 79 Verma, Shrikant, 76 Vidyalankar, Chandragupta, 77 Vietnam War, 157, 171 Vijaykar, V. M., 95 Vivekananda, Swami, 83 Wasi, Muriel, 99, 255n38 Watts, Philip, 31 Wedeen, Lisa, 2, 227 Welles, Orson, 31, 56–57 West, Mae, 99

Index 307 “Why the Films Sing” (Dasgupta, C.), 140–41 Wilkinson, Ellen, 29 Wolf, Konrad, 59 Women, 179–80, 213–17, 217, 249n41 Women’s question, 213–17, 217 Wordsworth, William, 137 Yadav, Radheshyam, 76 Yadav, Rajendra, 76

Youth: anger of, 169–70, 176–77, 188; in City trilogy, 201–7, 203–4, 206; employment for, 267n3; as impure spectators, 201; in India, 155–57; politics of, 154–55; poverty for, 269n35 Zanjeer (Mehra), 155–56 Zetterling, Mai, 201 Zils, Paul, 95