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.