Framed in the celluloid

From Raj To Swaraj: The Non-fiction Film in India

 

Just a little over six months after the initial Paris screening of their 'moving pictures', the Lumiere brothers despatched their representative to a huge market waiting to be tapped - India. The Cinematographe was a brilliant invention and the opening of the Suez Canal had reduced sea journey from four months to three weeks. There was, therefore, no reason to lose time.

The representative arrived at Apollo Bunder in Bombay, and took a horse-drawn carriage to Watson's Hotel, barely half-a-km up the road. It was here that several short-films were exhibited to an all-European audience on July 7, 1896. Come and witness "living photographic pictures in life-size reproductions", the advertisement said. The entry ticket was Re 1 and everyone was delighted with the results.

The era has passed, so has Watson's Hotel. The building, now called Esplanade Mansion, is a dilapidated structure populated mostly by lawyers' chambers and stationery shops. People who occupy these are, by and large, unaware of the history buried inside the debris. Gone too is the 'Kala Ghoda' (a mounted Black Horse) statue - symbol of British imperialism.

What has, however, not disappeared is the concept of cinema. Over the decades, India has achieved the distinction of being the largest movie-making nation in the world. These films are primarily commercial in nature, targeting the Hindi audience. There are also films made in regional languages. Again, there is the distinction of mainstream as well as 'art' cinema.

Then, there is a completely different genre of documentary films. Primarily non-fiction, some of these are often seen in movie-halls prior to the screening of commercial cinema. It is this strain of film that author BD Garga deals with in this book.

From Raj To Swaraj traces the origins of this genre of filmmaking since the early 20th century: About how young and excited photographer HS Bhatwadekar became the first Indian to shoot moving picture as early as 1899. His first two films dealt with two wrestlers and a monkey trainer respectively. Later, he made films on Parsis, affluent then as they are now.

Then, there was a wealthy Parsi from Kolkata, Jamshed Madan, who took over this fledgling 'trade' and converted it into an 'industry'. In 1907, he built the Elphinstone Theatre in Kolkata, which was to be followed by the establishment of three-dozen more such theatres. His team would screen events of local interest, besides films on industries like jute, coal, steel, etc.

The author has spent over 50 years in the business of filmmaking, and his experience gets reflected in the book. Narratives on the documentaries of the two Delhi Durbars (1903 and 1911) and on several films made over the years by a range of filmmakers - Satyajit Ray, Sukhdev and Anand Patwardhan - are dealt with detail.

However, non-fiction alone is not given attention in the book; equally detailed is the treatment of the Indian ethos and our political history of the past 100 years. As such, we come across choice pickings of trivia throughout the book. For example, when King George was to be crowned the Emperor of India, he was delighted. The reason being the provision in the British law that forbade the crown from leaving the English shores; a new crown would cost £ 60,000 - too much for the British taxpayer. Eventually, the Indian taxpayer paid for the new crown, currently lying in the Tower Of London.

The book makes one gasp at the large number and scope of films being made in the country over the past 100 years. And it talks of several unknown films, say, Tagore's Paintings (1962), which documents the fact that the Nobel laureate took up painting in his 67th year! What's even more surprising is the information that in the next 12 years, he brushed 2,000 paintings.

If you are looking for a scholarly book on Indian documentaries, this one is definitely for you.

When legends changed hands

During Partition, many Muslim legends like Manto had to flee India but this was compensated by Hindu greats who fled Pakistan. Leave now and return when the madness passes. It was this injunction, so sane then, so naïve now, that made thousands leave their homes for new homelands born under the drip of a knife. They never returned, of course, except in meaningless form, such as the grand old man of cinema A K Hangal going back decades later as part of an Indo-Pak peace delegation only to find that "nobody in Karachi remembered me". Others like Sadat Hasan Manto, the bard of Bombay, who relished the decadent glitter of the film world as much as the low life, did not survive the betrayal of the city turning on him. Manto said that he began to die the minute he left Bombay. He carried it around like a wound, and in his last years in Lahore, drunk and displaced in a mint-new Islamic state that tried him for obscenity, his singularity epitomised the irony of his most famous character Toba Tek Singh, a lunatic trapped in a No Man's Land.

In that great and tragic human exchange, Bombay and Lahore, like every other big city and town in the northern part of the subcontinent, were permanently altered, their kindness and bigotry simultaneously put to the test. Lahore, then a thriving centre of the cinema world, lost its lifeblood, as Hindu actors, directors and writers, among them B R Chopra and Pran, fled by train, plane and on foot, leaving behind the mess of homes and films unfinished on the floor. Bombay Beautiful, as Gandhi often called it, was the receptacle of this exodus of talent, though the loss of Manto alone was a debit that the sleight of account books could not balance.

Employed as a scriptwriter by Bombay Talkies, then co-owned by Ashok Kumar, Manto watched in growing fear as the mood in the city darkened. The studio, which had many Muslim employees, received hate mail from Hindus saying they would set fire to the premises, a threat which Ashok Kumar pooh-poohed, calling it a passing madness. "However, it never went away, this madness," wrote Manto. "Instead, as time passed, it became more and more virulent." Before he, his wife and two children joined the human caravan out of the city, which consisted of many elite Muslim families including that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Manto met in Bombay a man who had made the journey in reverse.

B D Garga, one of India's finest film historians, whose scholarly books on cinema have enlightened audiences in India and Europe, was a Hindu in Lahore. Before Partition, Garga was already in Bombay in the employ of the famous director V Shantaram but had returned to Lahore to work on a film. There, when the madness took over, a man clutching a knife that he had used and not bothered to clean, made a terrified Garga and his Muslim cook recite the kalma to prove they were not kafirs. Thanks to his fluency in Urdu, Garga passed the test, but it broke him. "I was certain that I would be able to return to Lahore one day," says Garga on email from Goa. "That this did not happen was heartbreaking. The senes of loss is hard to describe it is associated with so many memories – of streets, trees, friends, food etc."

Days later, he too was part of the caravan, getting on to a plane and flying to the safety of a Hindu city, Bombay, which had never defined itself by any religion except money. Garga called on a bitter Manto who offered him a drink, which, it being four o'clock in the afternoon, Garga refused. The meeting is recounted in the foreword to Garga's book The Art of Cinema. Manto complained bitterly about how the management of Bombay Talkies had fired all its Muslim employees. "Wishing to cut short Manto's painful monologue, Garga asked what he had been writing of late and Manto, with a blank expression on his face, replied: 'My pen does not move on the page these days.'

Unable to afford a plane ticket was a tailor in a Karachi jail. Hangal was told that unless he left for India, he would remain in jail. With his wife, son and twenty rupees, he boarded a steamer. "I was a communist and had IPTA friends in Bombay who came to Bhaucha Dhakka to pick me up. We stayed for some time in this fellow's house and sometimes in that fellow's house." A Kashmiri Pandit – his wife was Kamala Nehru's cousin – Hangal had defied his father and refused to work for the British, learning cutting to support himself. Even today at 90, after 200 films, 60 plays and a Padma Bhushan, the old actor is inordinately proud of his "scientific cutting skills" and the enviably high salary of Rs 500 it had earned him. In the 1930s, in Delhi, Hangal had cut khaddar suits for C F Andrews ("Have you heard of him?") and Bhulabhai Desai, and in Bombay, before he became famous in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, he had a little shop at Crawford Market, where among other things, he cut a suit for Pratapsingh Rane, who went on to become chief minister of Goa. "Many years later he saw me in Goa and he was very happy."

The director of Mughal-e-Azam, K Asif, also started out as a tailor – although as film writer Mihir Bose says in his book Bollywood A History, "He was keener on the ladies rather than making dresses for them." Asif did not leave for Pakistan, but the financier of his film, a Jinnah sympathiser, did, derailing a project that was to suffer monumental delay. Who did leave briefly is the man after whom a bus stop in Bandra, Mehboob Studio, is named. Mehboob Khan, a Gujarati Muslim, only to return though no one really knows why. Bose writes that Mehboob came back to find that his studio had been declared evacuee property but managed to pull strings, get it back, and go on to make his Nehruvian classics, Andaz and Mother India.

Who did not return was the legendary singer Noor Jehan, who Manto said "had a voice like crystal", and whose departure created a vacuum that Lata Mangeshkar ably filled. Some f ilm historians say that if Noor Jehan, who could both act and sing and whose baby wails were supposedly on pitch, had stayed, Hindi cinema might have gone down a different path, but others like Feroze Rangoonwala feel that she left because "there was no scope for her in India, her last few films like Village Girl had not done well, and Pakistan was always like a mirage holding out great hope". In Pakistan, where she had a legion following, she was given the title Mallika-e-Tarranum, which means Queen of Melody, a title that her friend "Latto" enjoys here, and who, according to Bose, spent many hours on the phone with Noor, singing songs and recalling the old days, before the madness.

BD Garga’s beautifully written new book: 'From Raj to Swaraj'

BD Garga has given Indian documentary makers their own history book.

BD Garga’s beautifully written new book, From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-Fiction Film in India, proves the sentiment 'Pink Floyd expressed in “Wish You Were Here”: Running over the same old ground, what have we found? The same old fears.' Garga’s account of how the documentary and short film developed in the subcontinent shows that back then, as now, documentary filmmakers have never had it easy.

Garga places the development of the documentary in India against the background of colonial government policies and the nationalist struggle and shows how things changed – or didn’t – after Independence. Garga has previously written a milestone book on Indian film, So Many Cinemas. In From Raj to Swaraj, he begins in the year Indians, specifically Mumbaiites, experienced the seventh art for the first time. On July 7, 1896, an assistant to the Lumiere brothers, who had introduced the world to films the previous year, screened six shorts in Mumbai. The early films screened in India included footage of imperial coronations and short films showing scenes from everyday life. When WWI broke out, the British screened war propaganda films across India, but they couldn’t contain the moving image.

By 1919, as protests against the empire increased, local and foreign filmmakers started sending camera crews to nationalist rallies and meetings. But, Garga writes, “Because of the severity of the government’s repressive measures, many of these films were never shown at the time.” The gem of the present-day Films Division was the Film Advisory Board, set up in 1940 to produce newsreels and reconstituted in 1943 as the Information Films of India. The newsreels produced by IFI and its sister organisation, Indian Movietone News, were compulsorily screened in every cinema hall in the country. Although the films were uncritical in tone, Garga writes that they were important windows to the tumultuous decade. and crafts. The organisations were closed down as India became free, but were revived in April 1948 as the Films Division. The book grew out of three files given to Garga by filmmaker JBH Wadia, who was chairman of the Film Advisory Board from 1940-’42. “This was primary source material, a writer’s dream,” the 83 year old said in an email interview from Goa, where he lives. “Shortly after, I had done a series of five articles on the evolution of Indian documentary for NFDC’s quarterly magazine Cinema in India. These articles created a lot of interest among documentary filmmakers and scholars both in India and abroad.” Garga eventually decided to expand his writings into a book. Apart from watching many of the films featured in the book, he rummaged through the National Archives of India in New Delhi and the British Library and the Imperial War Museum in London. Chapter six details the pioneering characters and films that helped Films Division make its mark in its early years.

Films on art and crafts were made, as were ethnographic films that reflected the government’s desire to educate the citizenry. By the ’80s, the focus shifted to independent filmmakers who, despite censorship threats and poor finance and distribution, have a better deal than their predecessors, said Garga. “Today’s filmmakers are in a much better position than documentary filmmakers of my generation who were either at the mercy of Films Division, state governments or advertising agencies,” Garga said. The future for documentary lies not as “an appendage to the main feature programme” but in the attempt to “compete with the feature film on its own turf”. That’s easier said than done. The only documentaries to find theatrical release so far have been Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace and Madhusree Datta’s Seven Islands and a Metro. Filmmakers still haven’t got the platform they need to finance, exhibit and distribute their films.

Garga’s gems Outtakes from key documentaries.

A film shot by Ritwik Ghatak’s brother Sudhish on the Fort Stikine explosion in the Mumbai docks in 1944 was confiscated by military officials and replaced by a tamer version that “played down the enormity of the incident with tame and tawdry images and narration”.

American journalist Louis de Rochemont shot the popular unrest against British rule in Mumbai in 1930. He had to smuggle out his negatives when the British asked for his film. He sent a can of film labelled “native festival scenes” to the US and handed over the footage of a festival in Pune to the British. However, his producer didn’t open the cans since he wasn’t interested in “native festival scenes”. It’s only after de Rochemont went home that was the film released, “a little late, but with spectacular results”. Acclaimed director Roberto Rossellini ran into trouble while making his documentary India ’57. Rossellini’s affair with Bengali actor Sonali Dasgupta scandalised the bureaucracy. The Indian government refused to extend his visa and debarred him from taking his exposed film out of the country. India ’57 left the Indian shores only after his estranged wife Ingrid Bergman appealed to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Earlier Reviews

Scholarly take on films - Amita Malik

The Art of Cinema: An Insider's Journey Through 50 Years of Film History

I HAVE been reading B.D. Garga ever since I can remember. One of my most respected colleagues, as writers on the cinema our paths sometimes crossed but not often enough as we led a nomadic existence.

Garga both wrote on the cinema and made films off and on. He spent long periods in London, Paris, travelled to Moscow and in the process increased his first-hand knowledge of international cinema. He was also one of the first in India to cover it as a journalist as well. I am therefore not surprised that he has brought out a comprehensive book and even less surprised that the book is titled The Art of Cinema. In the days of instant TV, where coverage of cinema is mostly confined to Mumbai cinema and, more often, stars and their professional and personal lives, the balance often tilts towards their personal lives.

Garga devotes his first chapter to "The Men Behind the Scenes", focussing on the workings of the directors, the camera man, the sound recordists and the editor. This gives a clue to the rest of the book, which is more of an encyclopaedia and a reference book for students of the cinema.

He then plunges into the "Greats of Indian Cinema", "the Indian Classics" and then to lengthy analyses of Swedish cinema, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and the Soviet cinema. In fact, he goes on to discuss topics like literature in film, soundtrack of Indian films, sex in Indian films, politics, Satyajit Ray, short films and much more.

But I find the book a little confusing and confused. Short chapters follow very long ones and there is no logical sequence to the subjects. Garga has put down what he feels as he thought about it but it makes things difficult for the reader.

The short film

As a writer on cinema, I found one chapter particularly satisfying, since very few books on Indian cinema devote worthwhile space to the short film. Garga not only describes its fluctuating fortune right down to the annual festival of short films held in Mumbai but also discusses the experimental and often rebellious short films by young Indians who run into problems with the establishment.

More importantly, he describes the golden age of Films Division when J.S. Bhownagary was sent from UNESCO in Paris to head the Films Division; when young filmmakers like Sukhdev, Pramod Pati, S.N.S. Shastry, K.S. Chari and others held sway. Names such as Harisadhan Dasgupta, Santi Chowdhury, M.F. Husain and others outside the Mumbai circuit are also given their due place in the history of documentary films.

The book is a refreshing change from the present books on Indian cinema, which tend to be hagiographic and concentrate on star value rather than focus in Indian cinema down the ages or its place in international cinema. The photographs, from the author's collection, are rare and fascinating.

One is also thankful for the comprehensive index because publishers are beginning to leave it out, thereby leaving readers in the lurch. I wish they had devoted as much thought to the sequence of chapters in the book, which would have made it easier for the readers.

A view from the box

B.D. Garga delves into the spell of celluloid in his book "The Art of Cinema"
THE GLORIOUS DAYS - A still from "Mother India" .

Well-known journalist Dileep Padgaonkar (few in Indian journalism are aware of his knowledge, concern and passion for world cinema), sums up B.D. Garga's insightful book "The Art of Cinema" (Penguin-Viking) by recalling the legendary Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's advice to a fellow writer and chronicler.

"K.A. Abbas had once urged Garga to be the Boswell of Indian film. Given his down-to-earth temperament and his consistent refusal to wear his learning on his sleeve, Garga entertained no such lofty ambition. Instead, in a sober and suave manner, he chose to tell us why some films click and some don't, why a technician or a director has, or does not have, the stuff needed to enchant the audience. Those who have come under the spell of cinema, especially Indian cinema in its moments of glory, will raise a toast to his pioneering accomplishments." No wonder the book is dedicated `to the memory of (the already forgotten) Khwaja Ahmad Abbas'.

The eminently readable book has been divided into four distinct sections. The first section has been devoted to the four important technicians, the `Men Behind the Scenes' who are responsible for transforming a narrative and its enactment into a wholesome motion picture - the director, the camera man, the sound recordist and the editor. One wishes he had included scriptwriters, lyricists and music directors, amongst others, as they are inseparable at least to the Indian film.

Legendary filmmakers

The second section, `The Greats of Indian Cinema' seeks to highlight the contribution of legendary film makers like Himanshu Rai, Debaki Bose, P.C. Barua, Sohrab Modi, Nitin Bose, V. Shantaram, Bimal Roy, K. Asif, Kamaal Amrohi, Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor. Few would disagree with Garga in his selection of masters of Hindi cinema, their contribution, individualistic styles and commitment to creativity on the cinema screens. He justifiably concludes the section, and chapter on Raj Kapoor with a telling observation. "In later years critics were to bemoan the lack of romantic lyricism and the intense emotional charge of his earlier work. Perhaps, justifiably. But there's no questioning his obsessive commitment to movie making. He lived, breathed and dreamed movies." In the section, `Indian Classics Revisited ' he seeks to dissect some films in a chronological order. "Devdas" (1935), "Sant Tukaram" (Marathi), "Achhut" and "Duniya Na Mane" (1937); "Pukaar" (1939), "Ramshastri" (1944); "Chandralekha", "Aurat" and "Mother India" (1957).

Censorship of cinema in India can never become redundant. And Garga tells us why. "Our cinema will remain mediocre, moralistic and platitudinous so long as it carries about its neck the deadweight of an unimaginative censorship.

It would be inconceivable to see a film where the ending is not happy, the villain is not punished, and honesty does not pay. All this with the `noble' intention of saving men from depravity and strengthening the moral fibre of the young."

One can only extend the argument, taking recourse to some recent recurrent incidents of the macabre kind.

Some rare black and white pictures make the book a collector's delight.